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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES 



H. CLAY TRUMBULL 







PHILADELPHIA 

JOHN D. WATTLES, Publisher 

1889 



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Copyright, 1889 

BY 

H. CLAY TRUMBULL 



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PREFACE. 



Lessons from one man's experiences and 
observations will not be of value to all. But 
lessons from any man's experiences and ob- 
servations will be of value to some. No man 
stands, in his feelings and sympathies, for his 
entire race. But every man, in his sympa- 
thies and feelings, stands for a class. 

Hence it is, that whatever truths have made 
a profound impression on a man in the prog- 
ress of his life-course are likely to make a 
correspondent impression on others who are 
like him, if he can bring those truths with 
any vividness before them. And when a 
series of related truths have excited interest 
in their detached separateness, they will 
hardly fail to excite fresh interest in their 
exhibited relation to one another and to a 

common central truth. 

S 



6 PREFA CE. 

The essays in this volume are an outcome 
of their writer's observings and experien- 
cings in his varied life-course. They were 
received with interest as editorial contribu- 
tions in the pages of The Sunday School 
Times, while appearing there, one by one, 
during a term of ten years or more; and 
their republication has been urged by many 
who desire them for preservation in a per- 
manent form. They are now presented in a 
new light, in a logical order for the elucida- 
tion and emphasis of a truth which is com- 
mon to them all. 

The gaining of the thoughts of this vol- 
ume has not been without cost to its writer. 
His hope is that the considering of them 
will not be without stimulus and profit to 

its readers. 

H. C. T. 

Philadelphia, 

August 14, 1889. 



CONTENTS. 



I. PAGE 

The Value of Day-Dreams 9 

II. 
The Blessing of Unrest « 19 

III. 
The Practical Power of Sentiment 29 

IV. 
Is Prosperity Desirable? 43 

V. 
Desiring, but Not Seeking 55 

VI. 
Inclination as a Hindrance to Success .... 63 

VII. 
Riches as a Hindrance to Success 71 

VIII. 
Is Success a Worthy Aim? 83 

IX. 

The Gain of a Contracted Sphere 91 

7 



8 CONTENTS. 

X. PAGE 

Progress Through Struggle 97 

XI. 
Attainment Through Catastrophe 105 

XII. 
Perils of Promotion .. . . • 113 

XIII. 
Building a Home for the Soul 121 

XIV. 
Consecration the Price of Comfort 131 

XV. 
The Gain of Lower Ideals than the Divine . 137 

XVI. 
Something Better than Angels 145 

XVII. 
What We Owe to the Sleepless 153 

XVIII. 
The Ministry of Sorrow 163 

XIX. 
What Our Dead Do for Us 173 

XX. 

The Aftermath of Influence 181 



I. 

THE VALUE OF DAY-DREAMS. 



Day-dreams are more common than night- 
dreams ; and their practical value is far greater. 
Sleep that is best and truest is a dreamless 
sleep; but a waking life that is without 
dreams is likely to be an aimless and an ill- 
furnished life; as, indeed, a waking life with 
dreams may be. 

A " dream" is defined as "a matter which 
has an imaginary reality;" as "a series of 
thoughts not under the command of reason." 
The root-meaning of the Anglo-Saxon word 
" dream" is "melody;" a pleasing succession 
of appeals to the finer senses. The same 
root shows itself, on the one hand, in " drum," 
and on the other hand, in "drone;" as, on 
the one hand, a melody — or a day-dream — 
may arouse to action, or, on the other hand, 
it may lull to sloth. To dream is to allow 

9 



I O ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 

fancy and imagination and unchecked antici- 
pation to have sway of the mind, or to give 
shape and color to the thoughts. Dream- 
life is the mental picturing of what may be, 
of what might be, or of what the individual 
soul would fain have to be. Day-dreams 
are the fancy-melodies which represent and 
which allure the innermost personality of 
the dreamer. And so it is that day-dreams 
are a potent factor in the best and truest 
human lives ; as too often they are in lives 
which are wasted and ruined. The day- 
dreams are no less an element of power in 
every life which indulges them, whether 
those dreams present pictures of noble 
achievement, or bring to mind scenes of 
sinful indulgence. 

Child-life is largely a life of day-dreams, 
and children have joy and hope, as again 
they are susceptible to special temptations, 
in proportion to their power of dreaming. 
It is the dream of manliness which gives 
zest to the tottering boy in his " playing 
horse" with an older brother, or with a 



A SPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 1 1 

chair to which he has fastened his twine 
reins. It is the dream of womanly love and 
womanly ministry which enables the. little 
girl to tend her doll so faithfully, whether 
that doll be a marvel of Parisian workman- 
ship, or the clumsiest rag-baby. Not the 
toy itself, but the day-dream into which it 
is taken, is the source of a child's enjoyment 
in all amusement with the plaything of the 
hour. Without day - dreaming, childhood 
would not be true childhood. A Christian 
missionary among a degraded people said, 
in illustration of the depths of wretchedness 
into which that people had fallen, " Nothing 
could show more clearly the utter hopeless- 
ness of the life of these poor creatures, than 
the fact that I have never yet seen one of 
their children at play." God pity a child 
who never has a day-dream ! God pity the 
man, or the woman, who has lost the child- 
power of day-dreaming ! 

Napoleon said that " imagination rules the 
world." And the imagination which sways 
the minds of such masters of men as Napo- 



1 2 ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 

leon, gives shape to their day-dreams of 
empire and conquest. It was in the day- 
dreams of Alexander of Macedon that the 
centre of the world's ruling first moved from 
Persia westward. The day-dreams of Caesar 
and of Cleopatra and of Anthony caused the 
banners of victory to wave hither and thither, 
with the following of Rome's legions. And 
the day-dreams of Charlemagne, of William 
the Conqueror, of Gustavus Adolphus, and 
of Peter the Great, found their realizing in 
new governments which should continue 
their forms, or leave their impress, for gen- 
eration after generation. What issues were 
the result of the day-dreaming of Muhammad 
and of Columbus! And how men watch 
to-day for the outcome of the day-dreams 
of Bismarck, and of Giers, and of Boulanger, 
and of Gladstone! 

General Grant tells, in his Memoirs, of the 
day-dream which filled his mind when, as a 
young cadet at West Point, he first saw the 
imposing presence of General Winfield Scott, 
then the commanding general of the armies 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 3 

of the United States. That day-dream pic- 
tured the young cadet in the place of the 
veteran commander; without the impressive 
stature of the great chieftain, but not without 
a corresponding record of valiant service. 
Who can doubt that such a day-dream was 
a help to, as it was a prophecy of, its own 
realizing? 

General Grant said to a personal friend, 
long afterward, that his habit of day-dream- 
ing never left him. When, after his resigna- 
tion from the army, he was working away 
on a farm near St. Louis, he was accustomed 
to carry into the city a load of wood for sale, 
and then to ride back in his empty cart. As 
he rode, he dreamed. His longing had been 
to command a regiment. And his wish, 
which now seemed a vain one, was to see 
Europe, with his good wife to share his 
sight-seeing. A favorite dream of his, as 
he rode homeward in the dusky evening, 
on that empty wood-cart, was of himself as 
again in the army, this time as a full colonel ; 
and then the dream would take him, together 



14 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

with Mrs. Grant, over the ocean for a tour 
of Europe. And that day-dream was as an in- 
spiration and a hope for him until, at the close 
of his second term as President of the United 
States, with the military honors of a great 
chieftain freely accorded to him, accompanied 
by his wife and children, he passed from coun- 
try to country, as in a triumphal march, receiv- 
ing the welcome of crowned heads and the 
greeting of glad hearts, all the world around. 

It is not more reasonable to say, in this 
instance, that the day-dream of the soldier- 
farmer had no part in the successful endeav- 
ors of the commander, the executive, and the 
citizen-traveler, than it would be to say that 
the day-dream of the boy Whittington by the 
roadside near London had no part in giving 
hope and energy to that boy in his struggles 
toward the Lord Mayoralty of the great 
metropolis. In the one case, as in the other, 

"Still, through the paltry stir and strife, 
Glows down the wished Ideal ; 
And Longing molds in clay what Life 
Carves in the marble Real." 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 5 

In the daily life of the humble toiler, as in 
the imaginings of the child and in the out- 
reachings of the man of genius, it is the 
dreaming of unattained possibilities which 
makes drudgery endurable, or which gives 
hope as a barrier to despair. The boy whose 
mother is left widowed and impoverished, 
dreams of being the owner of the old home- 
stead, and of making it the new home of her 
whose love inspires him ; and because of his 
dream he struggles on until its fulfilling. 
The mother dreams bright dreams for her 
one son, and whether he wilfully strives with 
or against her dreams, her dreaming enables 
her to persevere in his behalf against all dis- 
couragements and hindrances. 

Many whose lot is a life of privation and of 
disappointment, would despair if it were not 
for their continual dreaming of better things 
to come. 

" Dream after dream ensues ; 
And still they dream that they shall still succeed, 
And still are disappointed; " 

and yet they dream again. And without the 



1 6 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

help of day-dreams, rarely would a human 
life be joyous or be potent for good. 

Day-dreaming has its dangers. The dreams 
themselves may be in the wrong direction, 
unworthy of a true and noble nature. Or, 
again, while dreams of good they may be 
idly indulged merely as dreams. Dreams 
of sin are delusive inducements to sin. 
Dreams of high achieving are not achiev- 
ings, but they are calls to such attainment; 
and seldom is there found a life of high 
achieving except under the spur and inspira- 
tion of continuous day-dreams. 

All modern poetry takes its start and its 
shaping from the day-dreams of Dante. 
His early day-dream was of a poem which 
should be worthy of her who had prompted 
his dreaming. And thenceforward he lived for 
the realizing of that dream. "The spell of 
boyhood is never broken, through the ups 
and downs of life. His course of thought 
advances, alters, deepens, but is continuous. 
From youth to age, from the first glimpse 
to the perfect work, the same idea abides 



ASPIRA. TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 7 

with him, 'even from the flower till the grape 
was ripe.' ... It was the dream and hope of 
too deep and strong a mind to fade and come 
to naught — to be other than the achieve- 
ment and crown of life." 

"Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain, 
What exultations trampling on despair, 
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong, 
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain, 
Uprose this poem of the earth and air, 
This mediaeval miracle of song!" 

And every man's deepest and truest spirit- 
ual nature finds its inspiration in and through 
his purest and worthiest day-dreams. It is 
what he hopes for, or what he longs for, or 
what he is sure would be admirable if it were 
to be, that prompts a true man to his noblest 
strivings, and that sustains him under his 
heaviest burden-bearing. If he were with- 
out those dreams, he would be without the 
efforts at their realizing. 

Now, as of old, God reveals himself and 
his plans to his children in their dreams; only 
it is in the day-dreams, for the shaping of 



1 8 ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES, 

which they are themselves responsible ac- 
cording to his Word, — not in the ordinary 
visions of the night, — that men may find 
this revelation of the truth of God. Blessed 
are they who find and serve and honor God 
in their day-dreaming ! 



II. 

THE BLESSING OF UNREST. 



It was in mid-ocean, on a winter's passage 
across the Atlantic, eastward. A storm was 
raging. The great steamer rolled and pitched, 
by turns. Her beams creaked, and her mighty- 
frame quivered with the convulsive struggles 
of her engines and the sea. At the dead of 
night, her passengers were in their stateroom 
berths, many of them restless, and longing 
for rest. 

Suddenly, on that steamer, there was silence 
and rest, unlooked for. The engines stood still. 
The creaking and quivering had ceased. The 
great steamer no longer rolled or pitched. 
And, in an instant, those passengers whose 
chiefest longings had been for rest, started up 
in their berths, more disturbed than by all 
the disturbing restlessness which had pre- 
ceded this repose. Rest! at such a time, and 

19 



20 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

in such a place as this! Rest! when winds 
and waves are at battle, and a ceasing to 
struggle seems a yielding of hope! Rest! 
Is this the rest of death ? Only in the trough 
of the sea, and with the engines and the rud- 
der useless, can there be such rest as this. 
Oh for the old unrest, against which tired 
nature so rebelled! 

There was terror, and a new longing, in 
that untimely rest. And when, after a little 
season for the repairs of the steamer's shat- 
tered bow, the familiar quiver came again to 
the mighty frame, the engines rumbled and 
plunged as before, the beams creaked with 
their accustomed strain, and the mammoth 
vessel pitched and rolled and tossed, in the 
renewed struggle with the opposing elements, 
many a passenger who had stood or lain with 
bated breath, in that period of unwonted rest, 
thanked God for the restored unrest, with a 
new sense of its often unnoted blessedness. 

It is not alone upon the sea, in a winter's 
storm, at the dead of night, that there is a 
blessedness in unrest, even while the whole 



A SPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 2 1 

soul is longing for rest. Wherever there is a 
need of struggle, or a desire for progress, or 
a hope of difficult attainment, — there, passive 
rest is as the shadow of death, and unrest is 
the symbol and the evidence of abounding 
life. Only through present unrest, can abid- 
ing rest be attained to. Only through the 
experience of unrest, can abiding rest be 
found a blessing. 

In the dying-song of Moses, the Lord is 
represented as lovingly forbidding passive 
rest to his chosen son Israel ; as shaking him 
out from his place of satisfied repose, in order 
to his restless activities in the needed strug- 
gles of life and progress: "As an eagle stir- 
reth up her nest, fluttering over her young, 
spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, 
beareth them on her wings; so the Lord 
alone did lead him." So the Lord stirreth 
up the nest of every loved child of his, in 
order that that child may use his wings in 
aspiring flight. 

It was after Dr. Horace Bushnell had found 
his plans of life-work broken in upon by ill- 



22 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

health, and his hope of rest in his loved Hart- 
ford home rendered vain, by the necessity- 
laid on him of prolonged absence in travel, 
that he preached his famous sermon on Spir- 
itual Dislodgments, from the text : " Moab 
hath been at ease from his youth, and he 
hath settled on his lees, and hath not been 
emptied from vessel to vessel, neither hath 
he gone into captivity; therefore his taste 
[has] remained in him, and his scent is not 
changed." And the truth he then brought 
out from that text, is a truth of universal 
application : that passive rest of soul is incon- 
sistent with spiritual progress and high spir- 
itual attainment; that only through the trials 
of weary unrest can any blessing of final and 
abiding rest come to the human soul. 

George Herbert sang of this unrest, as 
"the pulley " of God's providence, by which 
man is drawn ever upward toward infinite 
and eternal good. The saintly poet pictured 
God as giving to man, at his creation, every 
possible gift save rest, and withholding that, 
lest its satisfying possession should deprive 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 23 

man of all longing for a better state than his 
present one. 

" For if I should, said He, 
Bestow this jewel also on my creature, 
He would adore my gifts instead of me, 
And rest in nature, not the God of nature ; 
So, both should losers be." 

Let man keep the other gifts of grace, He said, 

" But keep them with refining restlessness. 
Let him be rich and weary, that at least, 
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness 
May toss him to my breast." 

Sure it is, that every true soul is tried with 
constant unrest; and that because of its con- 
stant unrest there is in every true soul a 
continual and an unsatisfied longing for an 
unattained rest. "The eye is not satisfied 
with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing." 
That which is beyond our present possession, 
is to our thought better than the best which 
is yet secured to us. And sure it is, also, 
that the highest and noblest service of every 
true soul is obviously in the direction of that 



24 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

soul's restless aspirations. There is often- 
times great gain to us in what we know to 
be a vain desire. That which we can only 
long for, may be a means of our holiest up- 
ward strugglings. 

As Lowell phrases this truth : 

" Longing is God's fresh, heavenward will, 

With our poor earthward, striving ; 
We quench it, that we may be still 

Content with merely living ; 
But would we learn that heart's full scope 

Which we are hourly wronging, 
Our lives must climb from hope to hope, 

To realize our longing." 

And Owen Meredith voices the thought of 
many an outreaching soul, when he cries : 

" O heavenly power of human wishes ! 
For as wings to birds, and as fins to fishes, 
Are a man's desires, to the soul of a man. 
'Tis by these, and by these alone, it can 
Wander at will through its native sphere, 
Where the beauty that's far is the bliss that is 
near." 

If it were not for our restless longing and 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 25 

wishing, we should abide contented in our 
lower estate, and should lose both the possi- 
bility of high attainment, and the certain gain 
of noble strivings after the unattainable. 

We often wonder, and still oftener we re- 
gret, that we have been called to lives of such 
strange unrest, in spheres where rest was so 
desirable, and where it would even seem to 
have been most natural. Our thought is, 
that if we could only have been spared all 
these months or years of vain longings, if we 
could only have had granted to us the one 
thing which has caused us all these wearying 
and hopeless strivings, our life-powers could 
have been so much more effectively employed 
for good; and we could have been so much 
happier, while accomplishing so much more 
for others, for ourselves, and for God. 

But, if we look carefully and wisely at the 
lessons of our own experience, as well as at 
this all-pervading truth in the plan of God's 
providence, we shall see that the best there 
is in us, and the best that has been done 
by us, are manifestly a result of our much 



26 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

regretted unrest; that it is because the rest 
was denied us, that we have been outreach- 
ing and on-going in the direction of better 
and greater good, continually. Had God 
granted to us the rest we have longed for, it 
would have kept us in the passive useless- 
ness of the fledgling bird in its home nest, or 
of the mammoth steamer in the trough of 
the sea. 

There is, indeed, nothing for which we 
have more reason to be profoundly grateful 
to God, than the fact that God has never per- 
mitted us to be fully satisfied with what we 
have or with what we are. What God has 
withheld from us, while holding it before us, 
has, in many an instance, proved more of a 
blessing than that which he has granted to 
us. The unattained desire has been a means 
of our ever-attaining progress. 

Whenever you find a preacher or a writer 
who moves your very soul by his words of 
tremulous and sympathetic power; whenever 
you look into a face that shows depths of 
character and profounder depths of feeling; 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 2J 

whenever you note a tireless and a tender 
worker for the cause of Christ, in a lesser or 
a larger sphere ; whenever you feel a strange 
and an exceptional charm in the pervading 
influence of a true man or a true woman, in 
the realm of quiet social converse, — you may 
be sure that you have before you another 
illustration of the blessing of weary unrest; 
for there is never such power, such attain- 
ment, or such a charm, to a soul that has 
been always at rest. 

Even the spiritual rest which is assured to 
every trustful child of God, is a rest in rest- 
lessness. It is in a land where there are 
giants to fight, and walled cities to take, and 
ceaseless activities to pursue. Divine rest- 
lessness is a chief characteristic of that rest 
— which remaineth to the people of God. 

It is hard to be always restless ; but noth- 
ing that is good is easy. Dying is easy; it 
is living that is hard. Rest is the symbol of 
death. Unrest is the assurance of life. Let 
us thank God that we live, and that we are 
unceasingly restless ! 



28 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

" I cannot choose but live, because I die, 
And, when I am not dead, how glad am I ! 
Yet, when I am thus glad, for sense of pain, 
And careful am, lest I should careless be, 
Then do I desire for being glad again, 
And fear lest carelessness take care from me. 
Amidst these restless thoughts, this rest I find, 
For those that rest not here, there's rest behind.' 



III. 

THE PRACTICAL POWER OF 
SENTIMENT. 



To say of any lofty aspiration, or of any 
prompting to action, that " it is only a senti- 
ment," is, in the popular mind, to throw dis- 
credit on that which is thus characterized, 
and to classify it as unpractical, and therefore 
not worthy of the thought and endeavors of 
a person of sound sense. Yet there is noth- 
ing in all this world so practical as sentiment; 
nothing worthier of the utmost energies and 
of the innermost yearnings of any true man, 
or of any true woman. 

What is "sentiment"? Primarily, it is 

perception by the more subtile senses ; it is 

feeling which is a result of one's entirest and 

most distinctive personality. It "denotes a 

refined sensibility on subjects affecting the 

heart." In contrast with the results of cold 

29 



30 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

reasoning, we speak of " the sentiments of the 
heart/' as over against "the opinions of the 
mind." And just so surely as heart-power 
is superior to head-power, with this world as 
it is, is sentiment more potent, and inciden- 
tally more practical, than opinion. This we 
recognize, when we ask concerning a man 
who has expressed his formal opinions on a 
subject: "Yes; but are those his real senti- 
ments ?" And so it is, as Dugald Stewart 
tells us, that " the word sentiment . . . ex- 
presses . . . very happily those complex de- 
terminations of the mind which result from 
the co-operation of our entire rational powers, 
and of our moral feelings. ,, And so it comes 
to pass, that the real measure of any true 
man is the depth and the power of his senti- 
ment. 

There is all the difference in the world be- 
tween "sentiment" and " sentimentalism ; " as 
great a difference as between " child-likeness " 
and " childishness." Child-likeness is the 
attribute of the wisest of the sons of men, 
and is the type of him who is greatest in the 



ASPIRA TIONS AXD IXFL UENCES. 3 1 

kingdom of heaven. Childishness is a trait 
unworthy even of an untutored child. " Senti- 
mentalism " is the quality of resting inactive 
in mere feeling. " Sentiment" is that sway 
of the feelings which carries one out of him- 
self toward an object of love and life which 
is dearer to him than rest or safety or posses- 
sion. Sentiment is ennobling and practical; 
sentimentalism is ignoble and unpractical. 
Let no man confound the two, in his esti- 
mate of the worth and the power of either. 

There is no sphere where sentiment, in its 
best and truest meaning, is not the prevailing 
force in impelling to high endeavor. Both 
the Old Testament and the New give the 
foremost place in religion to lave; and what 
is love, if it is not a sentiment? What is 
patriotism, but a sentiment? What is human 
affection, but a sentiment? What is love of 
duty, or love in duty, — duty toward God, 
duty toward country, duty toward our fel- 
lows, — if it is not a sentiment? 

When Edward Everett was pleading for 
the completion of Bunker Hill monument, 



32 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

he confronted the objection that this was 
"only a sentiment," and that it had no prac- 
tical worth in our national life. " I am asked/' 
he said, " What good will this monument do ? 
And I ask, What good does anything do? 
What is good? Does anything do good?" 

Then he proceeded to show that the dig- 
ging of canals, or the building of railroads, or 
the prosecution of any means of wealth, is in 
itself of no immediate advantage, but de- 
pends for its ultimate value on its relatings 
to the interests and to the welfare of human- 
ity; that, in fact, there is "no good in the 
mere animal life, except that it is the physi- 
cal basis of that higher moral existence, 
which resides in the soul, the heart, the mind, 
the conscience, — in good principles, good 
feelings, and the good actions (and the more 
disinterested, the more entitled to be called 
good) which flow from them." 

" Now, sir," he concluded : " I say that gen- 
erous and patriotic sentiments, sentiments 
which prepare us to serve our country — feel- 
ings like those which carried Prescott and 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 33 

Warren and Putnam to the battle-field, are 
good, — good, humanly speaking, of the high- 
est order. It is good to have them, good to 
encourage them, good to commemorate them ; 
and -whatever tends to animate and strengthen 
such feelings, does as much right down prac- 
tical good as filling up low grounds and build- 
ing railroads." 

The love of one's country's flag is only a 
sentiment; yet brave men are ready to die 
for that flag on the field of battle; and when 
in the hush of peace the weather-beaten, bul- 
let-pierced, stained and tattered old flag is 
borne proudly through t.he city streets, on 
some memorial day, strong men shed tears 
at its sight; — "because of its associations/' 
you may say ; but what is any power of as- 
sociation except a " sentiment"? Associa- 
tions of time: the New Year, Christmas, a 
birthday, a marriage-day, a death-day, some 
anniversary tenderer than all these, it may be, 
— what is the peculiar charm of such a time, 
but a sentiment? Associations of place: the 
old homestead, the little school-house, the 
3 



34 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

village church, the woods, the meadow, the 
brook, the shore, the quiet graveyard; — that 
which hallows each of these is a sentiment 

" That's hallowed ground — where, mourned and 
missed, 
The lips repose, our love has kissed; — 
But where's their memory's mansion? Is't 

Yon church-yard's towers? 
No ! in ourselves their souls exist, 
A part of ours." 

Associations of material things: a mother's 
Bible, an old arm-chair, a faded flower, a 
lock of hair, 

u That little shoe in the corner, 
So worn and wrinkled and brown;" — 

is it aught but a sentiment that makes such 
a trifle a priceless treasure? 

Literature has power and permanency in 
its swaying influence, in proportion to its 
measure of profound sentiment. It is true, 
in a sense, that that alone can be classified as 
real literature, which appeals directly to the 
heart; that only those writings which are 



ASPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 3 5 

from the heart to the heart live on from age 
to age. Even in the sphere of inspired writ- 
ings, it is many times found that sentiment 
is a pre-eminent force over the mind of the 
reader. The poetry of the Psalms of David 
has swayed the human race a thousand-fold 
more mightily than the mere chronicle of 
David's life-story; and the abiding glory of 
Solomon is not the record of his temple- 
building, but to the memory of his inspired 
heart-teachings. Painting and sculpture are 
but appeals to human sentiment; but what 
would this prosaic world be without their 
poetic influence? Music is a sentiment; yet 
music sways human feelings as if it were an 
emanation of the Divine. 

Cardinal Newman, speaking of the won- 
drous power of music, says inquiringly : " Can 
it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, 
and keen emotions, and strange yearnings 
after we know not what, and awful impres- 
sions from we know not whence, should be 
wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and 
comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? 



36 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES, 

No; they have escaped from some higher 
sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal 
harmony in the medium of created sound; 
they are echoes from our Home; they are 
the voices of angels, or the Magnificat of 
saints, or the living laws of Divine guidance, 
or the Divine attributes ; something they are 
besides themselves, which we cannot com- 
pass, which we cannot utter, — though mortal 
man, and he perhaps not otherwise distin- 
guished above his fellows, has the power of 
eliciting them. ,, They are, in fact, in the 
realm of living sentiment, and not of life- 
less reason. 

So mighty is the sentiment-swaying power 
of music, that the bravest soldiers are afraid 
of it when it comes in conflict with a trying 
duty. The bands of the Highland regiments 
are, it is said, forbidden to play, during their 
foreign service, such a plaintive home-sug- 
gesting tune as " Lochaber No More," a popu- 
lar Scottish ballad of exile. Similarly, the 
Swiss bands are forbidden to play, while 
abroad, a ranz des vaches, or one of the 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 37 

melodies which the Alpine herdsmen play 
upon their alp-horns while driving home 
their flocks. 

As showing that every heart is human, 
and that in every land, and among persons 
of every race, 

" The bravest are the tenderest, 
The loving are the daring," 

Dr. S. Wells Williams gives this delightful 
rendering of an ancient Chinese poem, in 
illustration of this common truth: — 

" 'Twas night — the tired soldiers were peacefully 
sleeping ; 
The low hum of voices was hushed in repose ; 
The sentries, in silence, a strict watch were keep- 
ing 
'Gainst surprise or a sudden attack of their foes ; 

" When a low mellow note on the night air came 
stealing ; 
So soothingly over the senses it fell, — 
So touchingly sweet, — so soft and appealing, — 
Like the musical notes of an aerial bell. 

"The sleepers arouse, and with beating hearts 
listen ; 



38 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. ' 

In their dreams they had heard that weird music 
before ; 
It touches each heart; — with tears their eyes 
glisten ; 
For it tells them of those they may never see 
more. 

"Bright visions of home through their mem'ries 
came thronging, 
Panorama-like passing in front of their view ; 
They were home-sick; — no power could withstand 
that strange yearning ; 
The longer they listened, the more home-sick 
they grew. 

"Each looked at the other; but no word was 
spoken, — 
The music insensibly leading them on. — 
They must return home. — Ere the daylight had 
broken, 
The enemy looked, and behold ! they were gone. 

" There's a magic in music, — a witchery in it, 

Indescribable either with tongue or with pen. — 
The flute of Chang Liang, in one little minute, 
Had stolen the courage of eight thousand men." 

In our American civil war there was a 
notable instance of the swaying power of 
sentiment as expressed in home music heard 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 39 

by soldiers in the field. The two armies were 
encamped over against one another on the 
opposite banks of the Rappahannock, when 
a military band on the Union side of the river 
played in alternation the favorite airs of the 
opposing forces. As John Randolph Thomp- 
son tells the story, 

" Down flocked the soldiers to the banks, 
Till, margined by its pebbles, 
One wooded shore was blue with ■ Yanks/ 
And one was gray with ' Rebels.* " 

The tune of "Dixie" aroused the "yelling of 
the Rebels," while "Yankee Doodle" started 
the shrieks of the "Boys in Blue." But 
when all on both sides were thus excited to 
the utmost, another tune hushed them all to 
silence : 

" All silent now the Yankees stood 
All silent now the Rebels. 

" No unresponsive soul had heard 
That plaintive note's appealing, 
So deeply ■ Home, Sweet Home,' had stirred 
The hidden founts of feeling." 

A vision of his home was in every soldier's 



40 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES, 

heart, and the differences that separated him 
from his fellows across the river were all for- 
gotten as he and they turned back to their 
camps in tender thoughtfulness when 

'* The vision vanished, as the strain 
And daylight died together." 

It was "only a sentiment" evoked by mem- 
ory; 

" But memory, waked by music's art, 
Expressed in simplest numbers, 
Subdued the sternest Yankee's heart, 
Made light the Rebel's slumbers." 

It is sentiment which makes every-day 
home-life a joy and a blessing, where other- 
wise it would be toilsome drudgery. It is 
the poetry of affection, which enables many 
a tired wife and mother to labor on and to 
endure, through the dull and senseless prose 
of her existence. It is the sentiment of filial 
and fraternal love which gives zest to the 
efforts of children to be faithful to their pa- 
rents and kindly toward one another in our 
matter-of-fact world. It is the sentiment of 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 41 

an unselfish and an outgoing friendship, — a 
friendship which finds its highest pleasure in 
loving and in serving, with no craving desire of 
possession or return, — which is the most en- 
nobling and inspiriting of human affections, 
and which, in all the ages, has been found to 
prompt to the best achievements of which 
humanity is capable. Everywhere and always 
it is sentiment which is the chiefest force, as a 
swaying agency of the human heart ; the differ- 
ences are in the nature and the object and 
the measure of that sentiment. That senti- 
ment which rises to the highest ideal, is ever 
that which rises from the profoundest depths 
of a consecrated being; and he who sways 
others mightily, is always one who himself is 
mightily swayed. 

When General Joseph R. Hawley was ad- 
vocating, in the United States Congress, the 
fitting observance of our Centenary of Amer- 
ican Independence, he was met by the sneer, 
that " after all this is but a sentiment." " I know r 
it," responded the General, in his red-hot 
earnestness; "but I haven't a sentiment that 



42 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

I'm not ready to die for." Whatever senti- 
ment is worth living for, is worth dying for, 
— if dying be in the line of its right achiev- 
ing. And it is good to be so possessed with 
a noble sentiment, as to count it a minor 
matter whether life or death be a result of its 
expression and advocacy. 






IV. 

IS PROSPERITY DESIRABLE? 



In the very nature of the case, everybody 
wants prosperity. And in the very nature 
of the case, prosperity may be the worst 
thing in the world for a person; the last 
thing in the world to be desired or sought 
after by that person. As a preliminary, 
therefore, to any reaching out after prosper- 
ity, it is well for us to decide whether or not 
prosperity is a desirable thing for ourselves. 
Prosperity is evidently desirable for some 
people; but is it so for us? The answer to 
that question depends on what we mean by 
prosperity. 

" Prosperity " primarily means " according 
to one's hope," "agreeable to one's wishes." 
But not every man hopes or wishes for the 
same thing; nor are all men's hopes and 
wishes alike worthy ; hence a man's standard 

43 



44 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

of prosperity is good or bad, according to 
the man's standard of character and attain- 
ment. If what he hopes for is really desir- 
able, then to him prosperity is desirable; but 
if his wishes are unworthy, prosperity is in 
his case undesirable. 

If a man is a mail-robber (with or without 
a contract); if he is a bank robber (on a 
salary or only on a commission); if he is a 
stock speculator (with his own funds or with 
other people's money), — his idea of pros- 
perity includes the overthrow of somebody 
else; he hopes to rise by the downfall of 
others. And a large share of the prosperity 
that is desired among men, take the whole 
world over, is a prosperity that can be se- 
cured only at the cost of other people's 
possessions or comfort. That prosperity is 
not desirable. It is not right prosperity; it 
is not true prosperity. It is prosperity in 
the sense of being in the direction of one's 
hopes as they are; it is not prosperity, in the 
sense of being in the direction of one's hopes 
as they ought to be. Hence it follows, that 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 45 

prosperity is desirable only to those whose 
hopes are desirable; that prosperity itself is 
a good thing only when it is in the direction 
of wishes which are good, wishes which are 
worthy of a man's better nature and nobler 
destiny. To decide, therefore, whether or not 
prosperity is desirable to us, we must first de- 
cide whether our hopes and wishes are w r hat 
they should be. 

Men are very likely to judge of prosperity, 
for themselves or for others, by mere outward 
show; by that which can be seen of posses- 
sions or of success. They count health, and 
wealth, and a foremost place in the compe- 
titions of life, as essential elements of pros- 
perity; without seeking to know the effects 
or results of all these on the inner life and 
character, and on the ultimate destiny, of the 
possessor. If their eyes were clearer, they 
might come to see real prosperity in what 
before seemed adversity, and real adversity 
in what had the appearance of prosperity. 
They would see that in many an instance the 
man who has health and strength is distanced 



46 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

in both enjoyment and achievement by the 
man of feeble frame and of invalid body; 
and that it was the former's possession which 
caused his lack, while the latter's lack led to 
his acquisitions. They would see, also, that 
the rich man often fails of finding the pleas- 
ures of using money, while a poor man 
lives a life of personal comfort through his 
very poverty. They would see that many a 
man who has been kept in the background 
is brought to the front because of his keep- 
ing back; and that often the real victor is 
the defeated man. They would see that suc- 
cess frequently means ruin, while disaster is 
but a stepping-stone to success. As a con- 
sequence of all this, they would come to be 
more solicitous to have hopes and wishes 
that might safely be realized, than to have 
the realization of their existing wishes and 
hopes. 

To a child of God, true prosperity is what 
God would choose for that person, rather 
than what that person would choose for him- 
self. And God's standard for his children's 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES, 47 

acquirements is not the standard of the nat- 
ural heart for its own possessions. This 
truth is made clearer and clearer in the 
progress of divine revelation; all the way 
along from the picture-book lessons of the 
patriarchal histories, to the didactic teach- 
ings of the apostolic epistles. 

Lord Bacon says : " Prosperity is the bless- 
ing of the Old Testament; adversity is the 
blessing of the New — which carrieth the 
greater benediction, and the clearer revela- 
tion of God's favor. Yet, even in the Old 
Testament, if you listen to David's harp, you 
shall hear as many hearse-like airs, as carols; 
and the pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored 
more in describing the afflictions of Job than 
the felicities of Solomon. Prosperity is not 
without many fears and distastes; and ad- 
versity is not without comforts and hopes. 
We see in needleworks and embroideries, 
[that] it is more pleasing to have a lively 
work upon a sad and solemn ground, than 
to have a dark and melancholy w r ork upon 
lightsome ground: judge, therefore, [in this] 



48 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

of the pleasure of the heart by the pleasure 
of the eye. Certainly virtue is like precious 
odors — most fragrant, when they are in- 
censed or crushed : for prosperity doth best 
discover vice; but adversity doth best dis- 
cover virtue." 

It is not that God's standard has been dif- 
ferent in different ages; but it is that God 
had to teach man by symbols before he could 
make clear to man the full truth symbolized. 
In the days of Job, prosperity was commonly 
measured among men by camels and oxen 
and sheep and asses, together with sons and 
daughters. So commonly was this the stan- 
dard, that Satan himself had the idea that a 
man would love and serve God just in pro- 
portion to the pay of this sort which he 
received from God ; and there was probably 
a good deal in the conduct of men to make 
Satan have this opinion. But God tested 
the loving confidence of Job by giving him 
a touch of New Testament prosperity, that 
is, adversity; and Job stood the test glori- 
ously. It was after this testing that God 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 49 

gave to Job a new prosperity according to 
man's standard of judging; for Job had been 
found a safe man to have prosperity by God's 
standard, and by man's standard also. 

When Solomon, however, had everything 
that his heart could wish for, his heart went 
to wishing in wrong directions ; and then it 
was that "the Lord was angry with Solo- 
mon, because his heart was turned from the 
Lord God of Israel," and was seeking a pros- 
perity according to its own standard instead 
of according to God's standard. Therefore 
it was that Solomon's prosperity was not so 
prosperous as Job's adversity; and hence it 
is that "the pencil of the Holy Ghost hath 
labored more in describing the afflictions of 
Job [and their results] than the felicities of 
Solomon [and their consequences]." 

It is no new truth that is disclosed in the 
New Testament, when the blessing of God 
is shown to be in adversity quite as surely as 
in prosperity. It is simply a new disclosure 
of the truth which was symbolized in God's 
calling Abraham to leave his early home, 
4 



50 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

and become a pilgrim and a stranger in the 
world, with his richest possessions in prom- 
ises which could have their fruition only after 
his own death. The symbolic promise of the 
Old Testament to the obedient children of 
Abraham was of "a good land, a land of 
brooks of water, of fountains, and depths, 
springing forth in valleys and hills; a land 
of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig-trees, 
and pomegranates; a land of olives and 
honey; a land wherein thou shalt eat bread 
without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any- 
thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and 
out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass." 
That promise an uninstructed Hebrew wan- 
derer could understand. 

But the New Testament promise of the 
same God to the faith-filled spiritual descend- 
ants of the same Abraham reads very dif- 
ferently: "In the world ye have tribulation." 
" Yea, and all that would live godly in Christ 
Jesus shall suffer persecution." " For whom 
the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth 
every son whom he receiveth." " Blessed 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 5 1 

are ye when men shall reproach you, and 
persecute you, and say all manner of evil 
against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice and 
be exceeding glad : for great is your reward 
in heaven. ,, This New Testament phrasing 
of the Divine promise is not so attractive 
to the natural eye as the Old Testament 
phrasing was ; but to the eye of faith there 
is more to be grateful for in the later form 
than in the earlier. But this puts a new 
meaning into the question, Is it prosperity 
after God's sort, or after man's sort, that we 
are seeking, and for which we are longing? 

The words "prosper," "prospered," "pros- 
perous," "prospering," "prosperity," are 
found more than eighty times in the Old 
Testament. They sparkle to the natural 
eye all along the ancient record. But in 
the New Testament they appear only four 
times, and then each time with a peculiar 
signification, or a peculiar application, which 
can have a sparkle only to the quickened 
eye of faith. Twice Paul uses these words, 
and twice they are used by John. 



52 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

Paul writes to the Romans that he is pray- 
ing that now at length he may " have a pros- 
perous journey by the will of God" to come 
to them at their city. Yet he knew that 
"bonds and afflictions" were awaiting him 
" in every city." He was praying to be car- 
ried through, to get his share of those bonds 
and afflictions in Rome. Is that the kind of 
prosperity you are praying for? Again Paul 
writes to the Corinthian Christians, urging 
every one of them to give every Lord's Day 
according "as God hath prospered him." Is 
that your thought in connection with pros- 
perity? Are you thinking of success only 
as it will enable you to give more at next 
Sunday's collection (not in your will: Paul 
does not speak here of legacies) ? 

John uses the word "prosper" twice, or in 
two forms, in one sentence of an epistle. He 
prays that his loved follower may "prosper 
and be in health" even as the soul of that 
loved one prospereth. In other words, he 
wants to have that one have just as much 
prosperity outside as he already has inside 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 5 3 

— no more. Are you willing to accept that 
as the standard of your prosperity ? Do you 
want the Lord to see to it that you keep just 
as full (and just as lean) outside, in body and 
in all material possessions, as you are inside, 
in your heart and soul ? 

He who recalls the methods by which he 
has been helped upward and onward in the 
line of true spiritual progress, will see that 
his greatest gain has been made at times 
when he was receiving that which God knew 
was best for him, but which he himself 
deemed most undesirable. Recognizing the 
truth which underlies and is illustrated by 
these experiences and their results, he might 
well look for new prosperity as an outcome 
of new adversity. And his words might be: 

"When I look back upon my former race, 
Seasons I see at which the inward ray 
More brightly burned, or guided some new way ; 
Truth in its wealthier scene and nobler space, 
Given for my eye to range, and feet to trace. 
And next I mark, 'twas trial did convey, 
Or grief, or pain, or strange eventful day, 



54 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

To my tormented soul such larger grace. 

So now, whene'er, in journeying on, I feel 
The shadow of the Providential Hand, 

Deep breathless stirrings shoot across my breast, 

Searching to know what He will now reveal, 
What sin uncloak, what stricter rule command, 

And guiding me to work his full behest." 



V. 

DESIRING, BUT NOT SEEKING 



Desire is an impulse of the nature. Seek- 
ing is an act of the will. It is not always 
within our power to shape and regulate our 
desires; but it is within the scope of our 
powers to control and direct our seekings. 
Therefore it is that we, being what we are, 
are sure to have desires which we, being what 
we are, have no right to seek the gratifying 
of. Both our desirings and our seekings are 
measures and tests of our character; but our 
desirings indicate our character in its specific 
tendencies, while our seekings indicate our 
character in its deliberate purposes. And 
this is alike true whether the desiring and 
the seeking be noble or ignoble; worthy of 
us, or unworthy. It may be wrong for us to 
seek that which it is not wrong for us to 
desire; as, again, it is sure to be wrong for 

55 



56 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

us to seek that which it is not right for us 
to desire. 

A man's nature may be such that he de- 
sires retaliation or revenge, when he has been 
injured. In such a case, it is clearly his duty 
not to seek that which he desires. So, again, 
if his nature prompts him to desire more 
than his fair share in a division of property, 
he would be wholly at fault in seeking the 
object of his desire. If, indeed, his natural 
desires are in the direction of an indulgence 
in appetite or passion or lust, it would, obvi- 
ously, be wrong for him to seek the gratifi- 
cation of his desires. 

So far, it is easy to see, that one's desires 
are not in themselves a justification of one's 
seeking. But when, on the other hand, one's 
desires are not unworthy, and especially when 
they are in the direction of that which is in 
itself good and admirable, the wrong of seek- 
ing that which is desired is not so apparent. 
Yet in many a case it clearly is wrong to seek 
that which it is not wrong to desire; or, in 
other words, that which, in such a case, may 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 5 7 

properly be desired as a result, must not be 
sought as an end. 

Take, for example, a soldier in battle, a 
physician in time of pestilence, a ship's cap- 
tain on a sinking vessel with a crowd of pas- 
sengers to look after, an engine-driver on an 
express locomotive at the time of an impend- 
ing collision, or a man in any other peculiar 
peril under a sense of responsibility for others ; 
— it is as proper as it is natural for him to 
desire his personal safety; but it is clearly his 
duty not to seek that object of his inevitable 
desire. His seeking in such a case must, in 
a sense, be in the opposite direction from his 
desire; he must persistently do that which 
imperils the life he desires to protect, and 
only as he refuses to seek safety, even while 
still desiring it, can he prove himself a true 
man, and evidence a purpose of character in 
a nobler direction than the natural tendency 
of his character. 

Nor is it only on the plane of life-shielding 
that a man is likely to find himself forbidden 
to seek that which he is not forbidden to 



5 8 ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 

desire. Popularity, the favorable opinion of 
the public generally, is a thing to be desired; 
but not only is it wrong for a man to seek 
popularity as an end of his striving, but it 
may be his plain duty to do that which is 
sure to lose him popularity; and in such a 
case his right seeking is contrary to his not- 
wrong desiring. Praise, honor, position, may 
be desired without impropriety, when it would 
be wrong to seek that which is thus desired. 
To desire a nomination for an exalted public 
station is not unworthy of any man who has 
any measure of fitness for that station; but 
to seek a nomination to such a position is 
unworthy of any man who otherwise has high 
fitness for the station desired by him. In 
every walk of life, in fact, a man is constantly 
called on to refrain from seeking honors and 
gains which he cannot, nor indeed ought to, 
refrain from desiring. 

Even if it be in the realm of science, or 
literature, or art, or philanthropy, the man 
whose seeking is for that recognition and 
those rewards which he cannot but desire, 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 59 

instead of for that attainment in the line of 
his own ideals which ought to command recog- 
nition and reward, but which may not, is 
never likely to do so well, nor can he show 
himself so worthily, as if his seeking were 
not directly to obtain the object of his desires. 
No seeking to win a desired prize is so high 
a stimulus to supreme endeavor, as is the 
seeking to compass one's noblest ideal — prize 
or no prize. 

A good illustration of this truth is given 
in the life of Giovanni Dupre, an Italian 
sculptor, who died in Florence a few years 
ago. After several attempts — more or less 
successful — at winning prizes by artistic 
execution, Dupre was working hard for 
another prize, when word came to him 
that the proffered prize was withdrawn. 
" In his first fury of disappointment, he 
dashed his model to the ground, and broke 
it to pieces. And yet this very passion was 
but another step to his fame; for in his re- 
pentance he determined to atone for it by 
some grand work — a work which should 



60 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

live, and which he would produce alone, 
with no thought of winning prizes, and with 
no help from academies." Then it was that 
he designed and wrought his Death of Abel, 
on which his future fame was builded; and 
which can never be forgotten by one who 
has looked on it in the Pitti Palace, in 
Florence. Had Dupre continued to work 
for prizes, his best energies would never have 
been called forth; and his permanent repu- 
tation would never have been secured. And 
so in every department of mental activity; 
prize-offering and prize-seeking cannot bring 
out the best that is in those who are pos- 
sessed of high possibilities. Although it is 
every way proper for the artist to desire 
prizes, no artist can do his best work while 
seeking prizes. 

A desire to be loved is not only universal, 
but it is universally commendable. God 
himself seems to desire the love of all his 
creatures; and whoever retains any measure 
of the image of God desires to be loved by 
his fellows. But it is not universally com- 



. ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 6 1 

mendable for one to seek a love which is 
eminently desirable. A true woman, for ex- 
ample, may inevitably, and without impro- 
priety, desire the love of a true man whom 
she has come to know and to honor, when 
she must not seek his love; when, indeed, to 
seek his love would be the surest way of 
losing it. And as it is with a true woman, 
so, under other circumstances, it sometimes 
is with a true man. He may be forbidden 
to seek the special favor and approval of a 
noble woman whose esteem and regard it is 
not wrong for him to count desirable. 

Yet again the seeking to evidence love 
may be nobler than the desiring to win love. 
Just here, indeed, it is that the distinctive 
peculiarity of the highest friendship is found; 
in its triumph of the unselfish seeking to evi- 
dence love for a friend, over the not unworthy 
and yet the selfly desire to secure love from 
a friend. To desire to have a friend is emi- 
nently natural; to seek to be a friend is glo- 
riously preternatural. In other words, true 
friendship illustrates the truth that seeking to 



62 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. ■ 

be good is better than desiring to have good; 
and that seeking is not necessarily to be in 
the direction of one's desire. 

Desire is, indeed, never a safe guide of 
conduct; but seeking ought always to be in 
the direction of right conduct. Our desires 
ought to be worthy and noble desires; but 
whether they are worthy and noble or un- 
worthy and ignoble, our seeking ought to be 
that which, unmistakably, is both worthy and 
noble. We are not always directly responsi- 
ble for our desires ; but we are always directly 
responsible for our seekings. In every emer- 
gency, whether our desires are for food or 
dress or praise or fame or life or love, we are 
to seek first the kingdom of God and his 
righteousness, — to seek to be and to do that 
which is right, — and then all of those desired 
things which it is best for us to have shall be 
added to us; and herein is the comfort and 
the gain of duty-doing. 



VI. 



INCLINATION AS A HINDRANCE TO 
SUCCESS. 



Unless a man has his heart in his work, 
he is not worth much for that work. Yet 
not every man can have his heart in the same 
kind of work. One man can give his whole 
heart only to one line of service, and another 
man only to another line of service. Either 
of these men would be out of place, and 
comparatively useless, in the sphere of the 
other. The success of either pivots on his 
being where he belongs. How to find one's 
real place and work in the world is, there- 
fore, a question of practical moment for one's 
self and for those whom one is set to control 
or to counsel. 

A widely prevalent thought in connection 
with this subject is, that one's natural or one's 
acquired inclination in a certain direction is 

63 



64 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

an indication of probable success in that 
direction — under favorable conditions. Yet, 
as a matter of fact, an inclination is more 
likely to be a hindrance than a help to suc- 
cess — in the direction of that inclining. And 
true gain in life ordinarily comes through re- 
sisting one's inclinations, rather than through 
following them. 

An inclination is a natural or an acquired 
tendency, rather than an intelligent purpose. 
And with human nature as it is, one's ten- 
dencies are toward personal ease, rather than 
toward personal discomfort ; toward personal 
indulgence, rather than toward personal con- 
straint. One naturally inclines to do that 
which he can do with small effort, rather 
than to undertake that which will tax his 
utmost energies ; and the longer one follows 
his inclinations, the more difficult it is for 
him to break away in another direction. Yet 
it is obvious that activity and struggle and 
self-denial are essential to the developing of 
one's powers and to one's attainment of any 
high success in the world. Hence it is that 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 65 

inclination may prove a barrier to success, 
and that at the best it is a peril and a hin- 
drance in one's life-course. 

If, indeed, a young person inclines to over- 
eat, or to over-sleep, or to mope listlessly 
through the day, or to fly about in aimless 
motion, every parent or teacher recognizes 
the fact that that person ought to be trained 
away from his inclinations, rather than in 
their direction. So, again, if a young person 
inclines to extravagance, or to miserliness, 
or to carelessness, or to hasty speech, or to 
inconsiderate action, it is admitted by all that 
the inclination in such a case stands as a hin- 
drance to successful progress, and that added 
endeavor will be needful for the overcoming 
of that hindrance. 

But, on the other hand, if a boy inclines 
to spend his time reading, or drawing pic- 
tures, the thought of his parents is more 
likely to be that he ought to become a stu- 
dent or an artist. If he inclines to the use 
of tools, or to the examination of machinery, 
they are likely to take it as an indication of 
5 



66 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

his fitness for some mechanical or inventive 
pursuit. If it is to the enjoyment of music 
that he inclines, that is counted a ground of 
hope that he will become a musical composer 
or performer. If he inclines to endless dis- 
putings and arguings in the home circle, it 
is supposed that he would make a good 
lawyer. His inclination to write out little 
stories or moral reflections is looked upon 
as a fore-gleam of his power as an author, 
an editor, or a preacher. And so all along 
in the line of indicative tokens of possible 
success in life. Yet, as a rule, a young 
person's inclination in any direction is likely 
to be a hindrance, rather than a help, to 
success in that direction; because a man is 
less of a man for doing only what he inclines 
to do. 

High attainment involves persistent strug- 
gle. Persistent struggle demands compacted 
character. Compacted character is secured 
only through pressure and resistance. No 
man can gain the compacted character which 
enables him to struggle persistently toward 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 67 

high attainment, without a resistance of his 
personal inclination, and a pressure against 
unwelcome obstacles in his pathway. Incli- 
nation would carry a man in the direction of 
the swift-flowing current; but the brawny 
arm and the alert sense of the skilled boat- 
man are acquired in the pulling of the oars 
in the up-stream course, against one's inclin- 
ings. No man has eminent success in any 
sphere without doing a great deal of work 
which he would be inclined to leave undone; 
without, in fact, resisting his inclinations, in- 
stead of following them. 

It is so easy to follow one's inclinations, 
that a man is in danger of losing all the gain 
of struggle, with the consequent growth of 
manhood, in his favorite, but unfavoring, 
pursuit. He who always studies, or who 
always paints, in the direction of his inclina- 
tions, is not likely to be a successful student 
or a successful artist. He will lack that dis- 
cipline of mind and that mastery of personal 
powers which come through the doing of 
what one ought to do, whether one inclines 



68 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES, 

to do it or not; and such a lack is fatal to 
success. 

Ease of writing is rarely the natural pos- 
session of a successful editor. If he had 
had that, he might have relied on it to his 
injury. Exceptional facility of speech would 
commonly stand in the way of a man's being 
a first-class advocate or preacher, because of 
his making it a substitute for the means of 
real attainment in his profession. On the 
contrary, a firm purpose of success in the 
opposite direction from one's inclinations — 
in any line of endeavor — is in itself an earn- 
est of some sure attainment, if not indeed of 
high success, in the direction of that pur- 
pose. And so far one's inclinations are made 
a help to progress through their resistance, 
when they would prove a hindrance if they 
were conformed to. 

One's inclination is one thing; one's pref- 
erence is quite another thing. An inclination 
is a matter of tendency; a preference is a 
matter of choice. A true man's inclination 
is often in one direction, while his preference 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 69 

is in the opposite direction. A soldier com- 
ing under fire may be inclined to turn and 
run; but as a soldier his preference is to 
stand at his post, in spite of the risk. A 
loving watcher by a sick-bed may incline to 
sleep, and at the same time may prefer to 
keep awake. So in every sphere of life, the 
inclination may be against the dictates of 
wisdom and of duty; the preference ought 
always to be in accord with those dictates. 
What one inclines to is, indeed, a minor 
factor in one's proper preference for an occu- 
pation or a profession in life. 

In making one's choice of a life -pursuit, 
the chief question for one to ask himself is 
not, What do I incline to ? But it is, What 
ought I to prefer? As a basis of one's in- 
telligent preference, three points are to be 
considered wisely: Where can I best please 
and honor my Master? Where can I make 
the most of myself, and attain to the highest 
development of a noble personal character ? 
Where can I be of largest service to my fel- 
lows, in view of their interests for time and 



70 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

for eternity ? In answering these three ques- 
tions, one's special fitness — actual or attain- 
able fitness — ought to be taken into consid- 
eration. Ordinarily, it will be found, on a 
fair examination of the case by any child of 
God who sincerely desires to know and to 
do God's will, that the answer to all three 
questions will point in one direction, and 
that that direction is away from one's natural 
or acquired inclinations. But when one's 
duty is thus indicated, his deliberate pref- 
erence ought to be in the line of that duty y 
in spite of the obstacle, or the hindrance, of 
his inclinations. 



VII. 

RICHES AS A HINDRANCE TO 
SUCCESS. 



It is often admitted as a theory, even though 
it be depreciated as a practical teaching, that 
riches are a hindrance rather than a help in 
the spiritual life, and in aspiring struggles 
heavenward. But it is not a common belief 
that riches are liable to prove a hindrance to 
high success in the life that now is, and in 
laudable endeavors to attain to a permanent 
position among the honored names of earth. 
Yet it is equally true of the life that is and 
of the life that is to come, that riches are 
commonly a hindrance, and are often an ab- 
solute barrier, to successful progress and to 
permanent high attainment. If only this 
truth were realized in its entirety, what a 
difference it would make in the popular esti- 
mate of riches and of their possession ! 

7i 



72 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

Concerning the bearing of riches on the 
spiritual life, the words of Jesus are explicit, 
unqualified, and wide -reaching. "Jesus said 
unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, It 
is hard for a rich man to enter into the king- 
dom of heaven." The Revised Version shows 
the force of this statement even more clearly 
than did the old translation. "And again I 
say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go 
through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to 
enter into the kingdom of God. And when 
the disciples heard it, they were astonished 
exceedingly, saying, Who then can be saved ? 
And Jesus looking upon them said to them — 
With men this is impossible; but with God 
all things are possible." 

There can be no escape from the conclu- 
sion that Jesus here affirmed that riches are 
a natural hindrance to spiritual progress, and 
that only by a special miracle, by an act of 
God in arresting the natural order of things, 
can one who has riches be brought in safety 
through the spiritual peril of riches; that 
while it is possible for God to accomplish 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 73 

this fact, it is one of the hard things to do in 
the realm of the miraculous. Christian peo- 
ple generally do not act as if they really be- 
lieved this truth unhesitatingly; but there are 
those who will admit its correctness just as it 
stands, who are not ready to admit the added 
truth that it is hard for a rich man to attain 
to a really desirable position in the kingdom 
of this world. Yet this truth is as true as 
the other. 

Lord Bacon, who was a prince of modern 
worldly philosophers, and who never spoke 
merely from a spiritual plane in his treatment 
of practical themes of thought, says emphati- 
cally: "I cannot call riches better than the 
baggage of virtue. The Roman word is bet- 
ter, impedimenta [hindrances] ; for as the bag- 
gage is to an army, so is riches to virtue: it 
cannot be spared, nor left behind, but it hin- 
dereth the march; yea, and the care of it 
sometimes loseth or disturbeth the victory.' , 
Then, in commenting on the suggestion that 
riches will enable men to purchase themselves 
successes, Bacon adds that " certainly great 



74 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

riches have sold more men than they have 
bought out." And that which the great 
English philosopher here affirms as a gen- 
eral principle, is verified by the experiences 
of mankind in earlier and in later times. At 
the best, worldly riches are dragging hin- 
drances to progress ; and the successful march 
of life must be made in spite of these hin- 
drances, and not because of them. 

The more common thought in this matter 
is, that large wealth gives a man a great im- 
mediate advantage in position and in power 
in almost every sphere of life's activities; 
and that a lack of wealth is correspondingly 
to a man's immediate disadvantage almost 
everywhere: yet, as a matter of fact, the 
truth is quite the reverse of this popular im- 
pression. In order to test the truth at this 
point, it might be helpful to turn to some 
record of the world's great names, and to 
observe what proportion of those who at- 
tained to permanent eminence among men 
were either given their place for their wealth, 
or were materially aided in their struggle for 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 7$ 

it by their wealth. Perhaps there is no fairer 
measure of the relative permanent eminence 
of men among men than the fact of their 
securing a mention in a standard cyclopedia 
or a biographical dictionary. And accord- 
ing to this measure, what are the facts in 
the case? 

For example, there is the revised edition 
of Lippincott's Dictionary of Biography and 
Mythology, as edited by Dr. Joseph Thomas. 
It contains, say, forty thousand names, more 
or less, covering the great names of ancient 
and modern story, both historical and mythi- 
cal; including living celebrities in all lands. 
These names are of men and women distin- 
guished in every sphere of life: rulers, 
statesmen, heroes, travelers, financiers, manu- 
facturers, merchants, inventors, reformers, 
writers, preachers, orators, artists, actors, 
philanthropists, scientists, scholars ; even 
monstrosities, and criminals, and all others 
who for any cause are deemed worthy of ex- 
ceptional note in the world's story. It would, 
perhaps, be a surprise to those who deem 



76 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

wealth a foremost agency in securing emi- 
nence among men, to ascertain how few in 
all that record are named because of their 
great wealth, or because of that which their 
wealth obtained for them. From Midas and 
Croesus down to the Rothschilds and Astors, 
the men of wealth who are there named be- 
cause of their wealth are a pitiably small 
array; and the space which is devoted to 
them, even when they have a place there, 
bears no comparison with the space devoted 
to authors, or preachers, or discoverers, or 
inventors, or philanthropists, or to helpers of 
their fellows in any other way. 

All the stories combined of all the men 
who were eminent merely for their wealth, 
in that entire thesaurus of biography, oc- 
cupy no such space as that which is given 
to one man like Martin Luther, or William 
Shakespeare, or Immanuel Kant, or Jona- 
than Edwards, or Benjamin Franklin, or 
Abraham Lincoln, or many another who 
started in poverty and made his way up in 
the world without the aid of riches. The 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 77 

Rothschilds and the Astors together, in all 
'their generations, are there only given as 
many lines as Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. 
Cornelius Vanderbilt has less space than 
David Livingstone the missionary, or than 
even Paganini the fiddler. William H. Van- 
derbilt is not even mentioned. A. T. Stew- 
art's space does not equal that of Lemuel 
Haynes, the colored preacher; and it barely 
comes up to that of Daniel Lambert, the fat 
giant. 

Even where the wealth was employed in 
well-doing, the prominence of the money- 
giver seems to justify no such extended men- 
tion as that which is accorded to thinkers 
and scientists and reformers. Thus Stephen 
Girard, and George Peabody, and Sir Moses 
Montefiore, put together, do not have the 
space which is occupied by John Wesley, 
or by Nathaniel Hawthorne, or by Michael 
Faraday. For, after all, the most famous in- 
structor in a college is likely to have a popu- 
lar eminence above that of the man who 
merely endowed the college; and he who 



78 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES, 

writes a great book which finds its place in 
a public library will be more widely honored 
than he who founded that library. 

The money value is, in fact, always the 
lowest measure of permanent renown. And 
among the many living men of prominence 
noted in this collection of notabilities, not 
one of, say, the ten richest men in the United 
States at the time of its issue, receives even a 
passing mention among the celebrities of the 
reputed " land of the almighty dollar;" not 
one of them is named either for his posses- 
sions or for his performances; not one of 
them has won a place there by what he has, 
by what he is, or by what he has done or is 
doing. All of them have so far utterly failed 
of success in securing eminence in or through 
their pre-eminence as capitalists. Yet no 
other class of foremost men is so ignored; 
nor would it be likely to be. 

This selection of names for prominence in 
a thesaurus of biography like Dr. Thomas's, 
and the relative space given to them sever- 
ally, is not a matter of personal preference; 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 79 

but it is, as far as it can be, a record of the 
world's verdict on the claims of the individu- 
als to the permanent interest of their fellows 
generally. If, indeed, any intelligent observer 
of the course of events were to look around 
him now, and to say who of those whom he 
sees in the struggle of active life were to have 
a place in a permanent record like this, how 
rarely would he point to a man of great 
wealth as one who was likely to be thus 
honored! All the history of the race, and 
all the philosophy of life and of living, go to 
show that wealth neither purchases perma- 
nent fame, nor is ordinarily a means of its 
securing. 

Worldly fame is not the highest and noblest 
ambition in life; and no man ought to live 
for the purpose of securing a place for his 
name in a biographical dictionary. But, in 
view of the fact that so many are striving for 
wealth, or value wealth when it is in their 
possession, because of their belief that large 
wealth secures eminence and power, it is well 
to recognize and to face the fact that wealth 



80 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

does not bring the very result which is sup- 
posed to be its natural outcome. 

There are, indeed, many men of wealth 
who would give all their present and pros- 
pective possessions for the purchase of such 
a niche in the temple of fame as many a poor 
man has before now obtained. They would 
agree with the poet who says on this point : 

" Can all the wreaths that crown his head 
Compensate now to Homer dead 
The living Homer's want of bread? 
Yet who would not a beggar be 
To be as much renowned as he ? 
I would in sooth 'twere offered me." 

And although these men of wealth can make 
no such purchase as this, there may be a 
gain in setting before others who have as yet 
only started out in life, the unmistakable fact 
that if it is permanent honor among men 
that they desire, they will find riches more 
likely to be a hindrance than a help in their 
pursuit. They must win fame, if they win it 
at all, without wealth, or in spite of it, not 
directly because of wealth. 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 8 1 

The possession of wealth by a young man 
deprives him of the spur of necessity as a 
stimulus to that persistent and untiring en- 
deavor which is a requisite of the highest 
success in any line of business, or in any 
profession of life. If he makes progress in 
spite of his wealth, it is through the exercise 
of qualities which are rare among men; and 
at the best he is at more or less of a dis- 
advantage in comparison with those who are 
neither hampered nor tempted as he is. In 
almost every direction it will be found that 
those who are now foremost in their busi- 
ness or profession are those who were not 
encumbered w T ith riches to begin with ; and, 
on the other hand, it will appear that many 
who started in the same direction with the 
consciousness of riches at their disposal were 
speedily distanced in the race by their neces- 
sity-impelled competitors. 

If, therefore, a young man finds himself 
without riches, present or prospective, let 
him thank God for this advantage in his life- 
struggle; and let him push ahead in the line 
6 



82 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

of a high purpose in noble doing. He may 
yet do a great work in the world, and be per- 
manently honored by the world because of 
his well-doing. If, on the other hand, a 
young man finds himself in the possession, 
present or prospective, of worldly wealth, let 
him realize that he is at a decided disadvan- 
tage in his life-struggle; and that unless he 
is a good deal more of a man than his money- 
less competitors, he is likely to seem a good 
deal less of a man in the world's ultimate es- 
teeming. But let him not despair of success 
on account of this hindrance of his riches; 
for — "with God all things are possible." 



VIIL 

IS SUCCESS A WORTHY AIM. 



In the popular mind, success stands over 
against failure; the one being understood'as 
the converse of the other. And as no man 
deliberately aims at failure, most men aim 
at success. But the question is a fair one, 
Is success a worthy aim? Is a desire for 
success as success commendable and praise- 
worthy ? 

And to begin with, in considering this 
inquiry, it is well to ask, What is success? 
The w r ord " success " means, primarily, "to 
take another's place." It is from sub and 
cedo, "to go in place of;" more literally, "to 
go under" another, to come up in his stead. 
This primitive meaning of the w r ord is re- 
tained in the word "successor," as applied 
to one who comes into office, or position, or 
business, after another who has left it. The 

83 



84 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES, 

struggle of life being so largely one of com- 
petition, it is not to be wondered at that men 
come to look at all effort for position as a 
strife between one and the many ; the victor 
pushing aside his fellows, and obtaining that 
which they had held, or which they had 
sought. And so attainment has come to 
be practically deemed synonymous with 
success. 

" Success " in its primitive meaning is 
another term for that condition of things 
which modern scientists call "the survival 
of the fittest. 5 ' A vessel is sinking in mid- 
ocean; there is a scramble for the boats; 
strong mean and weak women and children 
are in competition for the few places in those 
boats; the strong men succeed, the weak 
women and children fail. A party of ex- 
plorers are on an ice-locked headland wait- 
ing for expected rescue; the supply of food 
is insufficient for all; those who are in fuller 
health take its larger share, causing the 
others to starve by degrees; the former 
succeed, the latter fail. A bank watchman 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 85 

is guarding his trust; a burglar grapples with 
and overpowers him; the burglar succeeds 
in his effort to get at the bank vault, the 
watchman fails in his endeavor to guard that 
vault. These are extreme cases, it is true; 
but they illustrate the primitive meaning of 
the term "success." 

Historically it is obvious, that, as a rule, 
men came to have prominence in their suc- 
cess through overpowering, or undermining, 
or displacing, their opponents and competi- 
tors. This was the case in the struggles for 
empire, in the contests of personal valor, in 
the strife for wealth. It was by the enforced 
failure of many that one would succeed; and 
whatever tended to or promoted failure on 
the one part, in the same measure tended to 
or promoted success on the other part The 
world's story of men's success is, therefore, 
largely a story of crime and craft and heart- 
less self-seeking. Success of that sort is 
surely not a worthy aim for any person. 

As the world has grown better, public 
sentiment is less ready than formerly to give 



86 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

open approval to success which is clearly 
based on crime. But even at the present 
day the primitive elements of success are 
not wholly eliminated from all those attain- 
ings and obtainings which enter into the 
successes which command popular attention, 
and which excite personal envy. Political 
success is often secured, and is still oftener 
sought, by means which elevate the unworthy 
man into the place of a deserving one. 

Many a successful capitalist has built up 
his colossal fortune on the failure of rail- 
road corporations which he has wrecked, or 
of estates which he has plundered, or of 
dealers whom he has "cornered," or of 
families ruined by the liquors, or the lottery 
tickets, or the nostrums which he has vended. 
The very basis of hope for success in many 
a line of business is the breaking down of 
others in the fields of its competition. Who 
will claim that such success is worthy of any 
true man's aim? 

He who strives to be ahead of others may, 
from one cause or another, have the success 



A SPIRA TIONS A ND INFL UENCES. 8? 

for which he is anxious, even though his 
efforts are less deserving than are those of 
his competitors. An unfortunate slip on their 
part, or an unfair advantage on his, may put 
those competitors behind him, while neither 
his own attainment nor theirs is so great as 
it might be. In a similar struggle for the 
pre-eminence, the same man might fail of 
success, while doing better than in the other 
instance; he failing not because of his own 
lack, but because of the yet better doing of 
a competitor. Who can say that success 
through another's failure is so noble an aim 
as is high achievement — even in failure 
through another's higher achieving? 

Jacob is the typical man of success. His 
very name means Succeeder, or Supplanter. 
His craft and shrewdness enabled him to 
succeed in every contest with brother and 
father and uncle. But there came a time 
when Jacob was more desirous of a blessing 
than of success in his personal conflict; and 
then it was that he won a better name than 
Jacob. He was more of a man in his one 



88 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

failure than in his every success. John the 
Baptist had a higher aim than success. He 
wanted to fill his own place faithfully, and he 
was ready to rejoice that another was to have 
a higher place than himself. And in noway 
did John the Baptist more clearly evidence 
that there had not been born of woman a 
greater man than he, than in those words of 
his generous testimony to Him by whom he 
was to be transcended: "He that cometh 
after me is preferred before me. . . . He 
must increase, but I must decrease." 

Any success which pivots on another's 
failure lacks the elements of a noble purpose. 
It is worthy of a man's best strivings to do 
as well as it is possible for him to do, and to 
rise as high as it is possible for him to rise, 
whether he be before or behind his fellows. 
It is not worthy of a true man to strive 
merely to transcend another, whether that 
other's mark and compass be high or low. 
Nor is it worthy of any man to reach out, 
graspingly, after that which belongs to 
another. Yet the world's ordinary measure 



A SPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 89 

of success, now as formerly, is met in a man's 
distancing of those who compete with him, 
or in his displacing of one who before had 
the first position. And herein it is that suc- 
cess, according to the world's standard, can- 
not be satisfying to a good man and a true. 

It is true, as the worldly-minded maxim 
has it, that " nothing succeeds like success/' 
And this is by no means a saying of modern 
origin; for Seneca said, at the beginning of 
our Christian era, " Success makes some 
crimes honorable;" and Tacitus, a little 
later, declared, "There is no room for hesi- 
tation in any enterprise which can only be 
justified by success." But it is also true, 
whatever the world has thought of it or may 
think of it, that faithfulness is better than 
success; that the right filling of one's own 
place in life, however humble and incon- 
spicuous that place may be, is a worthier 
aim for any man than the occupying of 
another's place. 

The "championship" and the "prize" are 
the world's approval of success; for these 



90 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

awards show that all competitors have been 
distanced by the successful one. "Well done, 
good and faithful servant," is the Lord's 
commendation to every one who has done 
his best with his talents, even though he has 
gained by them only other two, where his 
fellow has gained five. The Lord's approval 
is a worthier aim than the world's approval, 
in any sphere of life. 



IX. 

THE GAIN OF A CONTRACTED 
SPHERE. 



Practical power in this world is largely 
dependent on the limitations of the sphere 
in which that power is exercised. In the 
realms of physics and of morals, as in the 
realm of logic, the intension of a force is 
increased as its extension is diminished; 
hence the closer the contractions of our 
personal sphere in life, the more potent 
may be our influence within and beyond 
that sphere. 

A small quantity of gunpowder ignited in 
an extensive open field will spend itself in a 
powerless flash. The same gunpowder shut 
within the contractions of a gun-chamber 
would drive a solid shot far beyond the 
boundaries of that field, with the possibility 
of doing execution that shall decide a 

91 



92 ASPIRA TIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

battle or a campaign, and perhaps make a 
turning-point in the world's history. House- 
building is for the very purpose of contract- 
ing the limits of a home, so that there can be 
warmth there in winter, and cool air in sum- 
mer, and taste and convenience and comfort 
at all times. The garments which we wear by 
day, and the bed-clothing which covers us at 
night, do not in themselves give to us any 
warmth; they simply contract and limit the 
sphere within which the warmth of our own 
blood can be kept from dissipating its life- 
sustaining power. And so, in all things, the 
walls, the bounds, the limits, are in a sense 
both the measure and the source of power. 

No man ever grows so great as to fill im- 
mensity. He whose sphere of control and 
of influence is vastest, is still dependent on the 
limitations of that sphere, and on his abil- 
ity to occupy it fully. Be he tsar or kaiser, 
king, governor, shaykh, or chief, he is potent 
because he represents, or rules, not all hu- 
manity alike, but a limited portion of the 
human family; and just so soon as the limi- 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 93 

tations of his sphere are beyond the limita- 
tions of his ability, all the ability he has, 
however much it be, is useless for that 
sphere; and so he is a failure, not because 
he had no power, but because his sphere 
was not sufficiently contracted to make his 
power available. Many a military com- 
mander who has proved himself a man of 
rare power within certain limitations of com- 
mand, has utterly wrecked his reputation by 
being assigned to a larger sphere than he 
could fully fill as a commander. It is the 
same in all lines of business and of enter- 
prise, and of activity generally. A man is 
dependent for his practical efficiency on the 
due limitations of his sphere; and he owes 
quite as much to the boundaries which shut 
him in, as to the ability and the energy which 
he exercises within those boundaries. 

He who preaches or who teaches would 
labor without hope if there were no contract- 
ing limits to his sphere of effort. To stand 
on the highest mountain-top and cry aloud 
to the whole world, would be a mere waste 



94 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

of strength and breath. The preacher de- 
pends on the walls of the room in which he 
proclaims the gospel invitation, to bring that 
invitation back on the ears of his hearers, 
where otherwise it would be dissipated in the 
air beyond. Even if he stands at the street 
corners to deliver his message, he looks to 
the limits of the little knot of people who 
gather about him while he preaches, as form- 
ing and fixing his sphere of influence for the 
immediate hour. * 

The teacher, again, must have his school- 
room and his class, in order to his imparting 
instruction effectively. His best exhibit of 
attainments would be as flashing powder in 
the open field, were it not for the gun-chamber 
boundaries which give it force and directness 
within and from its class-room limitations. 
And so in all the sphere of mental and moral 
endeavor, the encircling and contracting 
limits of power, rather than the outgoing 
reaches of power, are the causes of good 
to the world, and the occasions of chief re- 
joicing to the worker. 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 95 

It is in and through the contracted sphere 
of home life, and because of the very con- 
tractions of that sphere, that woman is more 
potent in the world's forces than man can be. 
It is because she is wife, or because she is 
mother, or because she is sister, or because 
she is daughter, and that her personal influ- 
ence and her personal efforts are intensified 
within the contractions of that personal rela- 
tion, that she shapes and directs the spirit 
and thoughts and purposes and endeavors 
of her husband, or her son, or her brother, 
or her father, in a wider sphere than she 
herself could directly fill, and which but for 
her would never have been filled by him. 
Had her own sphere been larger, her power 
would have been less, — if indeed it had been 
anything at all. 

He who has the reputation of doing most 
for others is very often he who is simply 
responsive to the inspirations and the incite- 
ments of some loved friend, or other self, 
who is in the contracted sphere of personal 
influence which is back of his best endeavors. 



96 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

If that sphere were not so contracted, its 
influence could not be thus intensified as a 
force for his uplifting and on-speeding. The 
solid iron of his nature would remain inert 
and useless, but for the propulsion given to 
it by the carbo-nitrate in that inner chamber 
of generated enthusiasm, from which he 
makes his appearance in a show of power. 
And in the day of great disclosure the 
sources of good to the world will be shown 
as back of most that the world has credited 
with power. - 

No one of us can know surely the limita- 
tions which are essential to his effective 
working in his sphere. But God knows 
them exactly, and he never fails to assign 
them wisely. Not only does God give to 
one man five talents, to another two, and to 
another one, " to each according to his sev- 
eral ability," but he gives to one man a five- 
talent sphere, to another a two-talent sphere, 
and to another a one-talent sphere; "to each 
according to his several ability/' 



X. 

PROGRESS THROUGH STRUGGLE. 



It is a good thing for a young man, or for 
an old one, to have a great deal to contend 
with. Every man longs to make progress 
as long as he lives, and as a matter of fact 
there is no real progress in this life except 
through struggle. 

Unless there were a hammer to swing and 
an anvil to strike, the blacksmith would never 
have the brawny arm which marks his power. 
If there w r ere no hills to climb and no storms 
to face, the sturdy mountaineer would show 
no such superior vigor as makes him another 
being from the ease-loving dweller in the 
vine-embowered valley.. It is not the uniform 
and the parade which bring out the courage, 
and develop the highest manhood, of the 
enlisted soldier; but it is the march, the pri- 
vation, and the battle, which transform him 
7 97 



98 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

into the bronzed and ennobled veteran. Not 
the receiving of riches by inheritance, but 
the securing of them by unintermitted strug- 
gle, gives a capitalist the ability to be a 
leader in the world of wealth. It is rather 
the hindrances to knowledge than the helps 
to them, that give the scholar his final pre- 
eminence in the field of letters. And the 
man of character is always the man who has 
made progress through struggle, who has 
had a great deal to contend with, and has 
contended successfully. 

It is very natural for us to long for ease; 
but it is very well for us that we do not have 
ease. Ease is a good thing to look forward 
to; but we ought to thank God that there 
are so many streams to be crossed, and 
thickets to be pressed through, and moun- 
tains to be clambered over, before the place 
of ease can possibly be reached by us. It 
is really a cause for rejoicing, rather than for 
regret, that our children take so much of our 
time just now, that our housekeeping cares 
are so absorbing, that we have so much 



A SPIRA TIONS A ND IX FL UENCES. 99 

trouble with the servants, that our business 
interests are so perplexing, that our personal 
health is so precarious, and that one or an- 
other of the family is always getting sick. It 
would be worse for us, rather than better, if 
we did not have quite so many difficulties in 
the way of carrying on our school, or our 
farm, or our factory, or our newspaper, or 
our parish. 

The truth is we should not do so well in the 
very work where we now have these troubles, 
if we were without these troubles. If a min- 
ister, for example, seeks a new charge because 
he thinks that he can thereby get more time 
for reading and study, and for religious visit- 
ing, by using his old sermons without having 
to write new ones, it is commonly found that 
he gives no more time either to study or to 
visiting than before, and that he simply ceases 
to grow 7 in intellect or in spirituality. By the 
removal of the demand for his constant strug- 
gle to keep up with his work, there has been 
an interruption of his progress in his work, 
and a lessening of his power to work. And 



100 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

it is not the housekeeper, nor the teacher, 
nor the business man, who has least to con- 
tend with, who fills his or her place best, or 
who gets on most successfully. Can you say 
that it is ? 

Looking at this side of the truth, what 
have you most reason to be grateful for, 
when you awake in the morning, and think 
of the duties before you for the day? Just 
this, that you have so much to contend with ; 
that there are so many difficulties in your 
way; that you are beset before and behind 
and on either hand, and that you cannot 
move in any direction without a struggle. 
Even your very pains and aches ought to be 
a comfort to you. And what a satisfaction 
there may be in the thought of your prox- 
imity to that stupid servant, and that dis- 
agreeable neighbor, and that unfair business 
rival ! Really, there are obstacles enough in 
your path to be very encouraging. What 
cause you have for thankfulness! 

In the formation of personal character, 
even more than in material interests and in 



ASPIRA TIOXS AND IXFL UENCES. I O I 

things external to one's self, progress is made 
only through struggle. It is what one has 
to contend with, rather than what is favoring 
and helpful, that gives the opportunity of 
soul growth. When we see one who com- 
mands respect and admiration by the char- 
acter in his very look and bearing, we are 
sure that that character represents struggle 
and endurance — 

"As if the man had fixed his face, 

In many a solitary place, 

Against the wind and open sky." 

There is, in fact, no such admirableness in 
any human countenance as that which shows 
the result of successful struggle in the daily 
conflicts of life and in the exceptional battles 
of great emergencies. The plainest face ac- 
quires attractiveness through the signs of 
triumph over opposing forces of evil, within 
and without; while the most regular features 
lack winsomeness of expression if they lack 
the evidences of combat for the mastery over 
that which would hinder the soul's progress. 



102 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

Only, indeed, as a face marks attainment in 
character through struggle, does a face mark 
any high attainment in character. 

It is not pleasant to face this truth con- 
cerning the mode of true progress in life ; but 
it is pleasant to face the fact of the results 
of this mode of progress. He who has the 
combat before him must fix his thought on 
the issue of that combat rather than on the 
combat itself. This is the way in all of earth's 
conflicts. The bravest soldier shrinks from 
battle before he enters it; but when it is upon 
him, all his energies are aroused to fight it 
through to the end; and he knows, when that 
battle is over with, that he is more of a man 
than he could have been without the struggle 
it involved to him. So it is that we are to 
pray continually, " Lead us not into tempta- 
tion" — or trial; for trial and temptation are 
synonymous : and, at the same time, that we 
are to "count it all joy" when we "fall into 
divers temptations" — into many and strange 
trials which are upon us without our choice — 
"knowing this, that the proving of our faith 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES, 1 03 

worketh patience/' — or endurance; and that 
by the struggles and endurances of that trial 
we can be advanced in personal character. 

It is hard to be tempted; hard to be com- 
pelled to struggle day by day with new 
temptations, and, what is still worse, with 
old ones that seem never to lose their power 
or their persistency; it is hard to be some- 
times worsted in the struggle — for it is a rare 
campaign that knows never a temporary dis- 
aster or check to the soldiers who will have 
final victory; 

"But noble souls, through dust and heat, 
Rise from disaster and defeat 

The stronger. 
And conscious still of the divine 
Within them, lie on earth supine 

No longer." 

For our temptations, and our struggles with 
them, we have reason to be grateful to God. 
The very things that seem at this hour to be 
the great barriers to our progress in the 
Christian life are designed of God as means 
to our Christian progress. If they were 



104 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

removed, we should lose the struggle with 
them; and losing that we should lose the 
victory over them, with its spiritual uplifting 
to ourselves. Those barriers are, under God, 
a source of our hope for a higher and truer 
Christian manhood and womanhood. Let us 
rejoice in them now, because we shall rejoice 
over them by and by. 

" Beloved, think it not strange concerning 
the fiery trial among you, which cometh 
upon you to prove you, as though a strange 
thing happened unto you : but insomuch as 
ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings, re- 
joice that at the revelation of his glory also, 
ye [as conquerors through his grace over 
this trial] may/ejoice with exceeding joy." 



XL 

ATTAINMENT THROUGH 
CATASTROPHE. 



There are beautiful teachings of spiritual 
truths brought out, or rather suggested, by 
many of the discoveries of modern science. 
Whatever may be thought of the theories 
of materialistic naturalists concerning the 
world's beginning and progress, the facts 
which are disclosed through the studies of 
such men, as well as through those of rever- 
ent Christian scientists, are worthy of the 
close attention of every lover of God and 
of his works. God's writings, in the book 
of nature and in the book of revelation, com- 
mend themselves to all who would know the 
mind of God. 

The same great truths and the same great 

laws run alike through the kingdoms of 

nature and of grace, and the more we know 

105 



106 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

of the lower sphere the better fitted we are 
to understand and to appreciate the lessons 
of the higher. Even while some of the 
plausible scientific hypotheses are yet un- 
proved, there is a value in them from their 
correspondence with the recognized truths of 
spiritual life and progress. This is true, for 
example, of Professor Darwin's view of the 
origin of species in "the survival of the fit- 
test ;" and again of Professor Huxley's hy- 
pothesis, that by successive evolutions the 
nobler and the better orders of life came up 
from the inferior. How many illustrations 
of both these processes of formation and 
progress are found in the moral world, in 
accordance with the teachings of the Scrip- 
tures and the observations of our experience! 
Yet another theory that is broached in the 
realm of science, has its bearing, still more 
obviously, by way of illustration, on the spir- 
itual life. This theory is what Mr. Clarence 
King, the venturesome and enthusiastic 
Pacific slope explorer, has called "Catas- 
trophism and the Evolution of Environ- 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 107 

ment." His idea — which although not new 
is newly applied by him — is, that in the devel- 
opment of the higher from the lower orders 
of animal life, each successive stage of prog- 
ress was brought about by some great catas- 
trophe of nature, with a consequent new 
environment, or new surroundings, for the 
creatures which survived the shock. 

Thus in the case of the fossil horses of this 
continent, about which so much is said by 
Professor Huxley, Mr. King is confident, 
from his studies in the geological strata of 
the country from which the bones in question 
came, that "between each two successive 
stages of the horse there was a catastrophe 
which seriously altered the climate and con- 
figuration of the whole region in which these 
animals lived." And the scientist's conclu- 
sion is "that He who brought to bear that 
mysterious energy we call life upon primeval 
matter, bestowed at the same time a power 
of development by change, arranging that 
the interaction of energy and matter which 
make up environment should, from time to 



108 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

time, burst in upon the current of life, and 
sweep it onward and upward to ever higher 
and better manifestations. Moments of great 
catastrophe, thus translated into the language 
of life, become moments of creation, when 
out of plastic organisms something newer 
and nobler is called into being." 

How strikingly this hypothesis illustrates 
many of the processes of spiritual progress ! 
By divine ordering, the interaction of cir- 
cumstances and associations which make up 
a soul's environment burst in upon the cur- 
rent of spiritual life, and sweep it onward 
and upward to ever higher and better mani- 
festations. , Moments of great catastrophe 
thus become moments of creation, when out 
of plastic natures, under the influence of 
grace, a nature newer and nobler is called 
into being and play. 

A catastrophe befalls a quiet and lovely 
home, by which the husband and father is 
taken suddenly away. The elder son is but 
a bright and thoughtless boy. At once, how- 
ever, he is in a new environment. There is no 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 109 

one for him to look up to and to lean upon. 
His mother and younger sisters are reaching 
out to him for support. He is changed as it 
were in an hour. New responsibilities press 
upon him; his struggle to bear up under 
them develops and strengthens his every 
faculty. His step is firmer; his bearing is 
more erect; his face already shows the lines 
of thought and care and unselfish endurance 
for others. Through that catastrophe he has 
been raised from the plane of a careless, de- 
pendent youth to the sphere of a noble and 
holy manhood. 

Or, it is the young wife with the helpless 
babe, who seems crushed under the catastro- 
phe which deprives her of a loving husband's 
presence and care. How different a world 
she lives in now ! How changed is her en- 
vironment! And how she changes with her 
change of condition! How much less she 
cares for the attractions of the world about 
her! How her thoughts center on the little 
one left to her, and on the home where the 
family shall be reunited! Through grace 



1 10 ASPIRA TIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

her unspeakable sorrow transfigures her very- 
face and form, until she seems so spiritual- 
ized and refined by sanctified suffering that 
her every look becomes an inspiration and a 
benediction to all who watch her. She is of 
a higher order of being than before that 
catastrophe with its change of her environ- 
ment 

The young man engaged in his studies is 
startled by the intelligence that his father is 
a bankrupt, and that he must abandon his 
plans for a college course, and go out at once 
to earn his bread by daily toil. The man of 
wealth finds his property swept away through 
unfortunate investments, and is compelled to 
begin again in poverty after long years of ease 
and indulgence. He who has trusted another 
without doubt or hesitation finds in a sad 
hour that he has been betrayed by one whom 
he loved as his own soul. It may be fire or 
flood or pestilence which changes the whole 
face and circumstances of a community, and 
brings through that catastrophe a new envi- 
ronment to all whose home is there. There 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 1 1 

are a thousand ways in which the shock may 
come. Coming in any w T ay, its influence is 
manifest in the uplifted characters and the 
ennobled lives of all who are truly profited 
thereby. Without such a catastrophe, — some 
great bereavement, or disappointment, or loss 
of possessions, or change of condition and 
circumstances, — there can never be that great 
and rapid transformation by which a soul is 
swept onward and upward at once into a 
loftier realm of spiritual being. There is no 
other way " into the kingdom of God," than 
"through much tribulation," and tribulation 
often involves catastrophe with its change of 
the soul's environment. 

It is at last by the great catastrophe that 
we call "death," that our spiritual natures 
are brought into an environment which will 
enable them to exercise their best and high- 
est powers to an extent before impossible. 
And so it is that the material world in which 
we live moves on unceasingly toward that 
greatest of all catastrophes, "by reason of 
which the heavens being on fire shall be dis- 



1 1 2 ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 

solved, and the elements shall melt with fer- 
vent heat ; " when, "according to His promise, 
we look for a new heaven and a new earth, 
wherein dwelleth righteousness" — because 
perfect righteousness is consistent with that 
new environment. 



XII. 

PERILS OF PROMOTION. 



He who has no desire for promotion in or 
beyond his present field of service, lacks an 
important stimulus to best endeavor in the 
sphere of his present service. Yet promo- 
tion is almost sure to bring an increase of 
perils, even greater than its increase of 
honors and of opportunities. In order to 
do well where he is, a man must be inspired 
by the hope of a higher station than he now 
occupies. Yet a man's doing well where he 
is, does not prove that he would do equally 
well in a place above this one; and the 
moment of his transfer from a lower plane 
to a higher one is always a critical moment 
in his life of struggle for achievement. 

Well-doing in any sphere involves the 

possession and exercise of fine qualities; 

and he who has qualities which would fit 
8 113 



114 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

him for well-doing in a high sphere is sure 
to show those qualities in his well-doing in 
a lower sphere. But the lower the sphere, 
the smaller the measure of qualities neces- 
sary for success in that sphere; hence he 
who is fully competent to meet the measure 
there, may lack competency for the larger 
measure beyond and * above. Because the 
lower sphere requires a smaller measure of 
ability than the higher one, it is easier to 
find a man for the one than for the other; 
and on this account there is a constant lack 
of, and a consequent call for, well-doers in 
the higher spheres of service of every sort. 

Therefore it is that a man who does ex- 
ceptionally well in a lower place is pretty 
sure to be sought for in a higher one. But 
while competency for a higher place is cer- 
tain to manifest itself in competency for a 
lower one, competency for a lower place does 
not insure competency for a higher one; 
and when a man is promoted from the one 
to the other, his promotion may simply dis- 
close the limitation of his power, and prove 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 1 5 

the means of his failure. And so it is that 
there is always peculiar peril to a man in the 
time of his promotion and advancement. 

In every higher sphere of effort there is 
need of new qualities in order to its filling. 
It is not enough that there be a larger 
measure of the qualities before called into 
exercise, but there must be qualities which 
were not required for success in a lower 
sphere. The question comes, therefore, at 
every step of promotion, " Has the promoted 
one the added qualities which, together with 
those which he has already displayed, will 
meet the demands of his new position ?" 
It may be, for instance, that a man has 
shown rare fidelity and carefulness and skill 
in a position of personal trust and responsi- 
bility, and in consequence he is promoted to 
a position over others. His good qualities, 
as already evidenced, will be quite as impor- 
tant in his new sphere as in his old one ; but 
in addition to these he must have power to 
oversee others, and to direct them wisely. 
Without this added power he is a failure in 



Il6 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

his new position, and his promotion has put 
him where he cannot be a well-doer. 

Thus it is that it is sometimes said of a 
man, " He is a good lieutenant, but a poor 
captain.' , He can do well so long as he has 
another to tell him what to do, but he cannot 
plan for himself. Even if he has the plan- 
ning power of a captain, he may not have 
the power to oversee all that a colonel would 
have to be responsible for. And so all the 
way up in the line of military promotion. 
There was a remarkable illustration of this 
in our Civil War, where one of the most 
successful commanders of a division was 
incompetent to the command of an army, 
because he lacked those qualities which were 
essential to the oversight and wise use of a 
large number of divisions. In a battle, he 
was pretty sure to be interested chiefly in 
the portion of the field immediately before 
him, to the forgetfulness of its equally im- 
portant portions elsewhere. 

Whatever the sphere of endeavor, the 
perils of promotion are much the same. 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 1 7 

In the counting-room, the shop, or the 
factory, an advance to a higher grade im- 
perils the standing of him who is promoted. 
The good student may make a poor teacher; 
the eminent lawyer may lose his reputation 
for ability through his elevation to the bench; 
the first-class business man may wreck his 
prospects by taking a seat in Congress. A 
clergyman, who is doing an excellent work 
in the small parish for which he is suited, 
may prove a failure in a large city pastorate 
to which he has been called because of his 
success in the smaller field. Every step of 
promotion is a step into surroundings of new 
peril, and may prove a step beyond the limits 
of usefulness to him who takes it. 

One cause of peril to him who is promoted 
is his forgetfulness of the fact that he owes 
his promotion to no disclosed fitness for his 
new sphere, but wholly to his fitness for the 
sphere he has left. Because a man has done 
well in one place, he has, it is true, reason to 
think that he could continue to do well in 
that place; but he has therein no sufficient 



1 1 8 ASPIRA TIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

ground for supposing that he would do well 
in another place, which demands the exer- 
cise of qualities not yet evidenced by him. 
Others, indeed, may be willing to take the 
risk of trying him in the new place; but their 
risk is not so great as his in his transfer. 

Many a man, however, loses sight of this 
truth as he accepts a proffered promotion; 
and he starts out in his new sphere with the 
thought in his mind that he owes his pro- 
motion to a fitness for it already evidenced, 
whereas all his former achievements are in 
no sense a proof that his failure here will 
not be as marked as were his successes there. 
He does not realize that his past is no guar- 
antee of his future, and that, if he does well 
now, it must be by doing that which he has 
never done before. He is not only on trial 
anew, but he is on trial with the disadvantage 
of having acquired a reputation in another 
field, which he may be totally incapable of 
maintaining in this one. 

Confidence in one's powers is essential to 
one's best use of his powers- but no man 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 1 9 

ought to have undue confidence in powers 
which he has never exercised. And just 
here it is that the man who is most likely 
to fail through promotion is least likely to 
be timid in the acceptance of promotion. 
He has such confidence in powers which he 
knows he possesses, that he permits his 
confidence to include powers which he takes 
it for granted that he has, simply because 
he sees that he needs them. And he who, in 
such a case, thinks that he is sure to stand, 
is the man who is in greatest danger of fall- 
ing. One's honest questioning of his ability 
to succeed in a new field which opens before 
him by promotion, is essential to one's fair 
prospect of success in that new field. One's 
unhesitating confidence at such a time in his 
ability for an untried sphere, is a confidence 
based on his supposed possession of other 
powers than those now in demand; and it 
is likely to fail him when he finds its basis 
to be a false one. 

Entering a new field with a consciousness 
of its peculiar perils to him, a man may 



120 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

strive so earnestly and determinedly for the 
meeting of its requirements, that his filling 
of it shall be even more conspicuously suc- 
cessful than was his filling of the place below 
it In this way it is that promotion is a gain 
to a man, not because it is without its perils 
to him, but because by a sense of its perils 
he is aroused to new and larger endeavors 
for their overcoming. 

In other words, the man who thinks there 
is no risk to him in his promotion, is likely 
to be a failure through his promotion; 
whereas the man who realizes the perils 
of promotion may be advantaged by every 
step he takes in the line of promotion. If 
he knows that he is not yet fitted for his 
new place, he may become so. If he thinks 
he is already fitted for it, he never will be. 
His only safety, in fact, lies in his sense of 
his danger. 



XIII. 

BUILDING A HOME FOR 
THE SOUL. 



Many years ago, the writer of these words 
was riding with a gentleman through the 
woods, among the hills of New England. 
It was just at the close of an autumn day. 
The sound of a falling ax, in its quick, sharp 
blows, was heard in the distance with grow- 
ing distinctness. Presently, at a turn of the 
road, an old man was seen, at the work of 
felling trees. The gentleman stopped his 
horse, and called the wood-cutter by name. 
The latter turned with a hasty movement, as 
if impatient of delay, and looked to see what 
was wanted. The gentleman told of a job 
of work to be done on his own premises, in 
the village below, and asked if the woodman 
could come and attend to it. " No/' was the 
prompt and earnest response. "No; I'm 



121 



122 A SPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 

building me a house to live in now; and I 
mustn't do anything else till that's done. I'm 
an old man; and I've got no home. I've only 
a little while longer to live; and I must get 
me a house ready before I die. I'd like to 
do the job for you, I'd like to earn the money. 
But I must build me my house before it's too 
late." And the old man turned impulsively 
to his wood-cutting again. As the travelers 
drove on, the sounds of his falling ax were 
in their ears, until its quick, sharp blows 
grew fainter and fainter in the distance, as 
the evening closed in upon them. 

Many a time since then the thought has 
come back of that old man in his homeless- 
ness, longing to build himself a house before 
he should die. As he stood there with bared 
head, the last rays of the sunlight, as they 
streamed through the open woods, falling on 
his silvered hair; his worn face and keen eyes 
beaming with intensity of feeling and pur- 
pose; his trusty ax held with nervous grasp 
as he stayed its blows at the moment of un- 
welcome interruption; speaking out, as if in 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 23 

a struggle between determination and de- 
spair: "I'm an old man, and I've got no 
home; I've only a little while longer to live; 
and I must get me a house ready before I 
die," — that anxious woodman was a type of 
homeless souls everywhere; and he ought to 
be an example as well as a type. None of 
us can have satisfactory homes for our souls 
except as we build them : 

" Our to-days and yesterdays 
Are the blocks with which we build.'* 

As, in one sense, our bodies — which are 
given to us without our choice — are the tem- 
porary home of our souls; so, in another and 
wider sense, our characters, and our affilia- 
tions, and our heart possessions — which we 
are privileged to choose or to construct for 
ourselves — are to be the permanent home of 
our souls. It is in view of this truth that 
the Apostle counsels, "Let all things be 
done unto edifying," — edifying being simply 
another term for house-building; it may be 
building for others, or it may be building for 



1 24 A SPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 

one's self; and that again he gives warning 
to those, even, who are building on the right 
foundation: "Let each man take heed how 
he buildeth thereon." 

In building a material structure to live in, 
we have three things in mind: appearance, 
comfort, stability. We want the house with- 
out and within to be pleasing to the eye — to 
our eye, and to the eyes of others — therefore 
in its form and adorning and furnishing we 
need to be guided by a correct and a refined 
taste. So it ought to be in the building of a 
home for the soul. It is right to seek an at- 
tractive character, pleasing manners, and win- 
some ways. He who disregards appearances 
— who does not care how he may seem to 
others, and who has no preferences of mere 
taste, in thought and speech and action — is 
a poor builder, and is sure of a shabby home 
for his soul. It is a duty to have one's soul- 
home so full of loveliness that all who see it 
will admire. Its gathered treasures and rare 
adornments should show through the win- 
dows. Whatever the face may lack of origi- 



A SPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 1 2 5 

nal grace of feature, it ought so to glow with 
the light of kindness and sympathy as to 
appear beautiful to all. Manners and speech 
should so please, and conduct should so com- 
mand approval, that all who are lookers on 
will be glad that that soul-building has been 
erected near them, even though it is very 
unlike their own. To secure such attractive- 
ness of character and conduct the builder 
must cultivate his own taste in these direc- 
tions. He must seek companionship with 
those who have similar tastes, or higher 
ones; and he must zealously strive to con- 
form himself to the image of Him who alone 
is " altogether lovely." 

But what is attractive appearance in an 
earthly home, if there be no comfort there? 
Of what use is all the adornment that pleases 
s the eye, if no want of body, or craving of 
mind, or longing of the soul, is met in any 
room or its furnishing? In the soul-dwell- 
ing, as in every material home, there must 
be the means of light and warmth and ven- 
tilation. There must be appliances for the 



126 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

preparation of food, for the opportunities of 
study and work, and for the securing of rest. 
There must be rooms for others also; for 
those who are loved, and for those who serve. 
No soul-home can be a place of comfort unless 
it is larger than enough for one person. There 
must be noble thoughts, and holy purposes, 
and worthy endeavors, and high and pure 
imaginings, and delightful memories, and 
sacred affections, and unselfish friendships, 
as the furnishings of any house which gives 
comfort to the soul whose dwelling it is. And 
there must be the pillows of a good con- 
science, and the couch of that peace which 
is given only to those who put their trust in 
the Saviour of sinners, if comfort be possible 
there by day and by night. 

Such a comfortable home for the soul as 
this does not come to us by earthly inherit- 
ance. Nor is it found in the market for sale 
or to rent. It must be built by him who 
would have it; built slowly stone by stone, 
and furnished by degrees through the toils 
and self-denials of those who appreciate the 



A SPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 27 

value of all these possessions, and are willing 
to labor and to wait for them. 

" As in a building 
Stone rests on stone, and wanting the foundation 
All would be wanting, so in human life 
Each action rests on the foregoing event, 
That made it possible, but is forgotten 
And buried in the earth." 

He who yet lacks a home of comfort for his 
soul, has only himself to reproach for his 
homelessness, or for the cheerlessness of the 
home he has reared, but not duly furnished. 
Nor is it yet too late for him to seek this fur- 
nishing of that home. " If there be there- 
fore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort 
of love/' — of love for Christ, or of love for 
those who are given to us by God's bless- 
ing, — let us secure to ourselves as a perma- 
nent furnishing of the home of our souls, 
that " comfort wherewith we are comforted 
of God." 

Yet a home may be attractive in appear- 
ance, and may seem filled with all helps to 
comfort, while it lacks the stability which 



1 2 8 A SPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 

shall secure it permanence. Unless the home 
of the soul is to endure, the time and strength 
and treasure expended in its uprearing and 
furnishing have been a vain outlay. The 
testing time will surely come. " Every man's 
work shall be made manifest: for the day 
shall declare it, because it shall be revealed 
by fire; and the fire shall try every man's 
work of what sort it is." This final fire test 
is not of the foundation alone; "for other 
foundation can no man lay than that is laid, 
which is Jesus Christ;" but it is the test of 
the building upreared as a soul-home, on that 
foundation. It is the test of the Christian's 
pursued studies, and indulged tastes, and 
chosen affections, and prosecuted activities. 
It is the test of his memories and ideals and 
friendships and devotions. It is the trying 
of his gathered treasures in the furnace that 
spares nothing but the refined gold. 

Resting on the one sure foundation, "if 
any man's work abide which he hath built 
thereupon, he shall receive a reward" — the 
reward of a home with its stability, its com- 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 29 

forts, and its adornings, secured to him and 
to his forevermore. "Out of the common 
stones of your daily work," says Theodore 
Parker, "you may build yourself a temple 
which shall shelter your head from all harm, 
and bring down on you the inspiration of 
God." Therefore it is that the Apostle urges 
that not even a word be spoken by any Chris- 
tian believer, in ordinary social intercourse, 
"but such as is good for edifying" — good 
for house-building for the soul. 

Every soul has its place of sojourn even if 
it has not yet a home ; its tabernacle before 
its finished temple. And so long as the life 
of probation continues, there is yet time for 
the building of a permanent home for the 
soul, as an improvement on its earlier resting- 
places. But "the night cometh when no man 
can work," therefore it is that he who would 
have a fitting abode for his soul should hasten 
to prepare one that is worthy of its inhabi- 
tant. This thought it is that Dr. Holmes 
finds in the lesson of the "chambered nau- 
tilus," vacating successively its temporary 
9 



130 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

dwelling-chambers, in order to make prog- 
ress in its pearly temple-building: 

" Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 
As the swift seasons roll ! 
Leave thy low vaulted past ! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length art free, 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unrest- 
ing sea!" 



XIV. 

CONSECRATION THE PRICE OF 
COMFORT 



The only way of gaining Christian comfort 
is through Christian consecration. He who 
would have rest in Christ must be unreserv- 
edly in the service of Christ. Christ is never 
the truest helper until he is recognized as a 
master. The failure to perceive this truth is 
the cause of much vain seeking after rest and 
comfort and peace. 

" Come unto me all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden," says Jesus, "and I will give 
you rest." How the multitudes would flock 
at that call to share the benefits of that 
promise, if there were no qualifying clause 
to its provisions! All have their burdens. 
All want rest. All would turn to Jesus to 
tell him of their troubles and to ask his help, 
if nothing more were required of them than 

131 



1 3 2 .4 SPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 

this. But he adds, as showing the method 
of obtaining the desired blessing, "Take my 
yoke upon you," — assume the livery of my 
service, — "and learn of me; for I am meek 
and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest 
unto your souls." Ah! that puts another 
face on the matter. Everybody would be 
glad to have Christ as a servant; but not 
everybody wants to be a servant of Christ. 
Christ is a servant. He came not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister. But his 
highest service is to those who count them- 
selves his servants. His choicest ministry 
is to those whose greatest joy is found in 
doing anything for him. This is but one 
among many of the Christian paradoxes. 
Contradictory as it seems, it is in accord- 
ance with the principle which underlies all 
successful pursuit of enjoyment and efficiency 
in any sphere or relation of life. 

The happiest mother is always the devoted 
mother. She whose only thought of her 
children is of getting enjoyment from them, 
has no enjoyment in them. She has all the 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 3 3 

trials of motherhood with none of its com- 
forts. She, on the other hand, who lives for 
her children; who would do anything for 
them; who seeks to make them happy, has 
a delight in her children, receives joy from 
them, which no mother less devoted can 
know. The husband whose chief thought 
of a wife is of some one to make him happy, 
has no true home happiness. It is only he 
who is asking constantly, What can I do for 
my wife? how can I lighten her burdens? 
how can I gratify her tastes ? how can I add 
to her pleasures? who knows the fullest 
enjoyment of married life. It is a beautiful 
touch of true wifeliness in Dora, the child- 
wife of David Copperfield, which makes her 
find pleasure in sitting quietly by her hus- 
band's side to hold his little stock of pens, 
which he frequently changes as he writes, 
because she longs to do something for him, 
and has found that she can give him help 
in his literary pursuits in no other way. 

No real pleasure is found in any friendship 
except as a desire to prove one's self a help- 



134 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

ful, inspiring, comforting friend is the pre- 
vailing purpose of heart in that friendship. 
A readiness to serve, a desire of serving, is 
ever the measure and the proof of true affec- 
tion. As it has been said of Mary of Beth- 
any, in the exhibit of her abounding love 
for her divine Friend: "There was such a 
love in her heart for her friend and benefactor 
as imperatively demanded expression, and yet 
could not find expression in words. She 
must do something to relieve her pent-up 
emotions: she must get an alabaster box 
and break it, and pour it on the person of 
Jesus, else her heart will break. ,, 

In the Ordinary vocations of life, a man 
finds pleasure in his business or in his pro- 
fession in proportion as he is devoted to it. 
If he thinks of it only as a means of sup- 
port, it is a drudgery to him. But if he 
loves it for its own sake he can work for it 
night and day without tiring. Its demands 
on him become a delight, and he has happi- 
ness in its prosecution. It is the man who 
thinks his business is worth risking his life 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 3 5 

for, or whose profession is dearer to him 
than wealth or ease or personal safety, who 
has satisfaction in all his labors and sacrifices 
in that occupation year by year. 

The true soldier is a devoted soldier. He 
loves the cause for which he is in service, or 
the commander who represents that cause; 
and he is happiest when he can do most for 
the object of his devotion. The greatest 
commanders have always been those who 
were most successful in securing the per- 
sonal attachment of their soldiers; and no 
soldiers have had such enjoyment or such 
efficiency in service as those who were 
readiest to give their strength and to risk 
their lives for those who were over them. 
Nor is a soldier ashamed of his uniform, 
because it shows that he is in his command- 
er's, or his country's, service. The proud- 
est badges of nobility are often the collars 
or yokes of service — insignia of office in 
subjection to an honored sovereign. All 
the way along in life, in every department 
and sphere, there is no enjoyment except 



136 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

as a result of devotion; no comfort except 
through consecration. Why should we 
wonder that the same is true of the service 
of Christ? 

He who wants the joys of Christ's service 
must first be in Christ's service. Consecra- 
tion must precede comfort in the believer's 
life. He must look to Jesus for direction, 
before he calls on Jesus for assistance. His 
first thought in the morning must be, What 
can I do for my Master? not, What can my 
Helper do for me? So long as he is looking 
at Jesus merely as one to give him help and 
comfort and peace, he will fail to find what 
he looks for. But when he looks at Jesus 
as one whom he loves, and lives for, and is 
ready to die for; as one whose badge of 
service he is proud of, and whom he enjoys 
doing anything and everything for, — then 
he will have help and comfort and peace, 
according to the order of nature in all de- 
voted service, and according to the specific 
and unfailing word of Jesus in this sphere. 



XV. 

THE GAIN OF LOWER IDEALS 
THAN THE DIVINE. 



Man's best endeavors are always in the di- 
rection of some external ideal ; for, although 
an ideal is a standard of perfectness or of 
beauty which exists in the mind, that ideal 
standard is always formed by mental com- 
parisons with existing realities which are out- 
side of the mind. The genesis of the ideal 
must come from without, before the evolution 
of the ideal can begin from within. No artist 
can conceive a form or a hue of beauty, until 
he has perceived beauty in outline and in 
color with the natural eye. If, indeed, a man 
were born blind, no artist-sense could create 
for him an ideal that he could shape to de- 
light another's eye. And as it is in the realm 
of sense, so it is in the realm of thought, and 
of action, and of character; the mind must 

137 



138 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

have its standard pattern and model in the 
real, in order to have the power of conceiv- 
ing an inspiring ideal. 

An artist's best work presupposes good 
models. If he be a real master in his line, 
the artist has found his models in nature. If 
he be lower than a master, he has followed 
some master's pattern. History or tradition 
tells of the living models on which were 
based the loftiest ideals in the art of Phidias, 
Praxiteles, Michael Angel o, Raphael, Murillo, 
and the other master artists of the ages. And 
to-day the features and the form and the ex- 
pression of living models, or of well-known 
masterpieces of art, are recognized in the 
paintings or in the sculpture of the best of 
modern artists. All choicest landscape paint- 
ing is the idealized portraiture of nature. In 
every form of strength or of beauty in archi- 
tecture, there is the basis of some corres- 
ponding form in nature — in cavern, or grotto, 
or mountain, or rock, or tree, or leaf, or 
flower, or fruit, or vine. The ideal in art 
is ever and only the mentally transfigured real. 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 39 

Music in the soul is the echo and the re- 
sponse of music in the outer world. No 
thought of the poet or of the romancer ever 
came to the thinker until the thinker had 
come to its external suggestion, in his own 
or in another's experience. High achieve- 
ment was never a desire in the mind until 
high achievement was known to the mind as 
a possibility in the conduct of others. Nor 
was any attribute or trait of character ever 
longed after or aspired to, before that attri- 
bute or trait had been made known to the 
soul by its disclosure and its illustration else- 
where. The worthiest and the noblest innate 
promptings of a man toward the good and 
the true impel him to choose the best that is 
before him for a choice, and to reach out 
after the best that is above and beyond him 
as an object of desire; but they do not in- 
form him what is best absolutely, before that 
best has, in some way, been set before him 
as a reality. A man's truest ideal must have 
its basis of conception in the truest real. 

The divinely implanted conscience tells 



140 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

every man that he ought to be good and do 
good, but a divine revelation is needful to 
show a man what good is, in character and 
in conduct. Where there is no explicit reve- 
lation of the Divine nature to guide man's 
thoughts of God, man's conception of God, 
or of tfie gods, is never above the reality of 
imperfect and depraved human nature as it 
is. And even where there is an explicit rev- 
elation of God's attributes, man's conception 
of those attributes is still vague and partial 
until he sees some reproduction of them, 
however faint, in the best traits of a fellow- 
man. 

Here, indeed, is both the need and the 
proof of the Incarnation. God must be man- 
ifest in the flesh, in order that human nature 
could be seen in its ideal possibilities of like- 
ness with the Divine nature. And unless 
God had been manifest in the flesh, the con- 
ception of Jesus Christ as a character and 
personality would be an impossibility to the 
human mind to-day. God would never have 
been clearly disclosed to man as an ideal of 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 141 

perfectness, without the figure of Jesus Christ 
in the world's history. And Jesus Christ 
could never be the ideal figure that he is to 
the world, if he had not been a God-revealed 
reality in history. 

Nor is it sufficient to have Jesus Christ as 
the ideal standard of human character and 
of human conduct, without any intermediate 
exhibit, between him and ourselves, of the 
attributes and traits which his nature person- 
ifies and illustrates. Human nature needs 
the inspiration and the encouragement of 
purely human ideals, reflecting and, so far, 
reproducing the one perfect Ideal, as an in- 
centive and a pattern to worthy being and 
doing. We know that we ought to be like- 
minded with Christ; but Christ is so far 
above us, and we are so hopelessly unlike 
him at the best, that we are in danger of 
despairing in the struggle, while we have 
nothing before us but that absolutely per- 
fect Divine-human standard of attainment. 
When, however, we see the likeness of Christ 
imaged in one trait or another of a human 



142 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

follower of Christ, that trait has new attrac- 
tiveness to us from its very possibility of 
imitation; and so the followers and wit- 
nesses of Christ become our inspiring help- 
ers toward Christ. 

Every truest follower of Christ and every 
exceptionally earnest servant of God to-day 
has before his mind some human ideal, or 
ideals, as his incentive and as his cheer in 
his daily strivings God-ward. He would 
never have known the beauty and the noble- 
ness of an absolutely unselfish affection, of 
a simple fidelity to duty in all things, of an 
unswerving consistency of uprightness in 
conduct, of tender considerateness in word 
and manner toward others, of heroic bearing 
and doing in emergencies, if he had never 
seen one of those traits of character attrac- 
tively illustrated in fact or in story. 

It may be that it was a man's mother or 
his father who first held before him an in- 
spiring ideal of character and of conduct; 
or, again, it may have been his teacher, or 
his pastor, or some companion and friend; 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 1 43 

or, yet again, it may have been a missionary 
hero, or a saintly worker in the home-field, 
of whom he heard or read. Not, commonly, 
from one character alone, although often from 
one chiefly, the ideal has been derived, which 
is unfailingly before the mind of the aspiring 
struggler after good. And on the worthiness 
and the nobility of a man's human ideals of 
desirable attainment depends much for his 
own progress and ultimate gain. 

Well is it for a young person if so lofty an 
ideal is before him in his home circle that it 
can remain his worthy inspiration all his life 
through. And well is it for an older person, 
who has never had a truly inspiring ideal 
before him, or who has outgrown his earlier 
ideals, if he can be made newly acquainted 
with a character which shall inspire him to 
yet unreached attainments of good. There 
is no treasure on earth to be compared with 
an attractive human ideal of character and of 
conduct, which draws one ever upward and 
onward in the line of his best and truest 
nature, humbling him by his sense of lack in 



144 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

that direction, while it incites him to ceaseless 
struggle to be better and to do better after 
that inspiring pattern. Unfailing gain is a 
certainty so long as such an ideal is all-sway- 
ing in a human life. 

Whoever has a worthy ideal before him, 
let him thank God for its possession, and let 
him remember that that ideal can be to him 
a worthy ideal only so long as he recognizes 
it as a gift from God and as a help toward 
God. And let him who struggles toward a 
worthy ideal, bear in mind that even he may 
be an ideal to some one yet behind himself 
in the God-ward race. That thought should 
be an added incentive to every man to falter 
not nor tire in his ideal-ward strivings — for 
the sake of others as well as for himself. 



XVI. 

SOMETHING BETTER THAN 
ANGELS. 



All angels — all good angels — are God's 
"ministering spirits, sent forth to minister 
for them who shall be heirs of salvation. ,, 
But, not all ministering spirits sent forth to 
minister for them who shall be heirs of sal- 
vation, are angels. There are times when 
only angels can help a child of God in his 
earthly need ; and again there are times when 
an angel can do very little for a troubled 
child of God. There are some things which 
only angels can do ; and there are some things 
which angels obviously cannot do. When 
an angel's help is available, there is nothing 
better than an angel's help. But when an 
angel is helpless for ministry to an heir of 
salvation, then there is something better than 

the help of angels. God's loving provisions 
10 145 



146 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

for his earthly children are not limited by 
the capacity and the experience of angels. 

The heir of salvation, while he is an heir, 
has need of human sympathy; and no angel 
can give human sympathy, however much 
he longs to give it. The best that an angel 
can do, is to bring cheering promises, and to 
give material help, from God. Sympathy is 
based on experience, and no mere angel has 
entered into our human experiences — as a 
basis of sympathy. 

When Elijah felt himself all alone as a 
servant of God among a sinful people; 
hunted for his life by a cruel queen, away 
from the habitations of men, weak, famish- 
ing, despairing, and finally falling asleep in 
his weariness, — it was an angel who came 
and wakened him, speaking to him words of 
cheer, and ministering to him in tenderness, 
giving him food and drink, and watching 
him again as he slept; awakening him once 
more, to send him to God for fresh assurance 
and direction. But the Lord knew that there 
was a limit to an angel's help to Elijah, and 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 1 47 

that Elijah had need of something better than 
this for his permanent help. The prophet 
could go " forty days and forty nights" in 
the strength of the angelic supply of his 
wants; but then he would tire out as before 
in his wearisome work, if he were left with- 
out a sympathizing human fellow. So the 
Lord provided young Elisha to be a com- 
panion helper of Elijah; and from that hour 
Elijah seems never to have been without the 
loving presence of that human helper, until 
the ascending prophet looked down through 
the opening heavens upon his earthly com- 
panion and successor. 

When Paul was on the storm-driven ship, 
with neither sun nor stars appearing for 
weeks together, — not one, nor all, of his two 
hundred and seventy-five despairing ship- 
mates, could speak the word which should 
assure him of his earthly future. An angel 
of God must be deputed for that service. 
So the angel was sent; as God is always 
ready to supply the angel-ministry which his 
children's necessities require. But when the 



148 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

storm was over, and the winter was passed, 
and the shores of Italy were finally reached, 
and Paul, the prisoner, was nearing the city 
of the Caesars, his human heart had its 
human longings for that human sympathy 
which no heaven-deputed angel could bring 
to him ; therefore God saw to it that Chris- 
tian brethren from Rome went down along 
the road to meet the soldier-bound apostle : 
"Whom when Paul saw, he thanked God, 
and took courage." Those sympathizing 
brethren were better than angels in their 
ministry to Paul; for their ministry of sym- 
pathy was beyond the possibilities of angel 
ministry. 

There are times when one loving, tender, 
sympathizing human helper can give us more 
of courage and cheer in our desponding 
earthly struggle, or . in our trial of loneli- 
ness, than a legion of angels would be able 
to. Our Saviour recognized this truth when 
he would come into the world to evidence 
to the race his love and sympathy. " Since 
then the children are sharers in flesh and 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 149 

blood, he also himself in like manner par- 
took of the same. . . . For verily not of 
angels doth he take hold, but he taketh hold 
of the seed of Abraham. Wherefore it be- 
hooved him in all things to be made like 
unto his brethren." 

And it is because Jesus was here in flesh 
and blood, having the nature of the sons of 
men, and not the nature of angels, that he 
can sympathize with us, being "touched 
with the feeling of our infirmities," he hav- 
ing been " in all points tempted like as we 
are," although "without sin." Thus there 
is a power of personal sympathy with us on 
the part of our loving Saviour, which he can- 
not delegate to an angel who was never of 
our nature, to the extent that he can dele- 
gate it to one of his human servants and 
representatives. In other words, Jesus him- 
self can do for us by means of our human 
fellows what he cannot do for us by angel 
ministries; and he can do through us for 
others of his children, beyond all that he 
could do for them through the angels. So 



150 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

it is, that there is something better than 
angels in the provisions of God's grace for 
the heirs of salvation. 

There are many trials which no angel could 
understand, and which we are inclined to 
think no other human being than ourselves 
can feel the weight of. It is a comfort, in 
such a case, to be assured that we are under- 
stood and sympathized with by some one 
who would gladly help. us if he could. A 
loving look, a look of fellow-suffering in our 
behalf, the pressure of a warm hand, a start 
or a shiver of pain because of our pain, even 
an unexpressed though not an undisclosed 
sense of personal sympathy with us in our 
peculiar burden-bearing, is sometimes far 
more helpful to us than many words of in- 
spired counsel could prove. 

If, indeed, we were seriously and hon- 
estly in doubt as to God's wisdom and love, 
or as to the ultimate issue of our severest 
trials, then an angel's assurances might ben- 
efit us beyond any human ministry. But 
when we know that it is all right that we 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 5 1 

should suffer as we do, and that good will 
finally come of it, it is better to be told that 
some one knows how hard it is for us to bear 
up under this all, than to be told that it is 
our duty, and that it is for our highest ad- 
vantage, to endure patiently, and in faith, 
unto the end. 

It is those who have been through trials 
themselves, those who have been bereaved, 
or betrayed, or disappointed, and who have 
suffered and sorrowed accordingly, whose 
words and looks of appreciative sympathy 
come home to our hearts in our hours of 
need, as no words of well-meant instruction 
or encouragement can come at such a time. 
All of us have felt the difference between 
the ministry, in our sorrow, of one who 
could say, out of an overflowing heart, "I 
know all about it. It is terrible ;" and one 
who could only speak out of a loving heart 
which had never bled from wounds like this. 
Even in the closest friendship, there is more 
comfort in being thoroughly understood in 
our weaknesses, than in being admired in 



152 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

our strength. Appreciation is in itself the 
truest and most helpful affection. 

In the light of this truth, do we not see a 
new cause for rejoicing in our own peculiar 
experiences of temptation and struggle and 
endurance and sorrow? Apart from any 
question of our personal need of chastise- 
ment, or of discipline, or of progress toward 
holiness, through those experiences which 
try us most sorely, we are, by their agency, 
being fitted for a better than an angel's min- 
istry to our Saviour's loved ones. We could 
never do such work for Christ, without these 
experiences, as we can do through their 
enduring and improving. No one, on earth 
or in heaven, in the lack of such experiences 
as these, could do the work which we are 
thus preparing to do. 



XVII. 

WHAT WE OWE TO THE 
SLEEPLESS, 



It is because there are others who will not 
sleep, that we have the privilege of sleeping 
in restfulness and in safety. And it is be- 
cause of the wakeful watching of those who 
cannot sleep, that our wakeful hours have 
much of their added cheer and helpfulness. 
Sleeping and waking we are indebted to those 
who wake while others sleep; and it be- 
hooves us to be mindful of our multiplied 
obligations to the sleepless. 

In our city or our village homes we go to 
our sleep at night with a feeling of security 
because of the wakefulness of policemen and 
of other watchers, who guard our persons 
and our property while we sleep. Riding 
across the country by railroad at night, we 
lie down to sleep as restfully as in our 

i53 



154 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES, 

homes, because of our confidence in the 
sleepless watching of engineer and of brake- 
men on the train, and of guards at the bridges 
and the switches along our track. Crossing 
the ocean, we seek rest in our berths without 
anxiety, because we know that at the pilot- 
house, on the deck, at the lookout, and in 
the engine-rooms below, there are keen eyes 
that will not sleep. And so on land or sea, 
at home or abroad, we have reason to realize 
our indebtedness to those who wake while 
others sleep. 

From the beginning of our troubled life 
to its fevered close, our safety pivots on the 
willing sleeplessness of those who watch in 
our behaif. It is because the loving mother 
will not give way to sleep, when her tired 
body and her throbbing head long for it, and 
she keeps awake only by the exercise of all 
her firm will, prompted by the best impellings 
of her whole true heart, that the helpless child 
is brought safely through the varied trials 
and ills of infancy. It is only as the de- 
voted wife or sister, or as the skilled nurse, 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 155 

watches in tireless wakefulness by the bed- 
side of the strong man struggling with acute 
disease, that he on whom the family, the 
community, or the nation, leans is held to 
continued life, and is raised to renewed ac- 
tivities in health. It is, indeed, by the sleep- 
lessness of the sleepless, that the sleeping 
and the waking of those who sleep and wake 
bring rest and refreshing, and are guarded 
from unnumbered perils. 

The importance of sleeplessness on the 
part of those who must watch while others 
sleep, is brought out and emphasized in that 
article of war which makes it a crime pun- 
ishable with death for a soldier on guard to 
sleep on his post. On that soldier's sleep- 
lessness there may depend the safety of his 
command, the issue of a campaign, the life 
of a nation, the current of a century's his- 
tory. If, therefore, he sleeps, he must die; 
for many may die as a consequence of his 
failure to be sleepless. A sense of his re- 
sponsibility as a watcher goes far to enable 
a soldier-sentry to keep awake on his post 



156 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES, 

when his eyes are heavy with sleep. A cor- 
responding sense of indebtedness to him for 
his fidelity in being sleepless ought to have 
a place in the minds of those who are saved 
by that soldier-sentry's waking and watching. 
And it is true that no one so fully realizes 
how hard and how important it is that a 
soldier on guard should be a sleepless sol- 
dier, as does a soldier who has himself been 
compelled to faithful sleeplessness in such 
a place. 

At the close of the terrible series of seven 
days' fights in the vicinity of Richmond, in 
the second year of our civil war, when Gen- 
eral McClellan was making his move from 
the Chickahominy to the James, a detach- 
ment of cavalry was ordered in advance to 
the position which the Union Army was to 
occupy near Harrison's Landing. A young 
officer of that detachment had assigned to 
him, at night, the picketing of an extended 
line, with only ten men at his service. It 
was a critical time. His force was pitiably 
insufficient for its purpose; but it was all he 



ASPIRA TIONS A ND INFL UENCES. 1 5 7 

had. The best he could do, therefore, was 
to do the best he could. If he could guard 
that line until daylight, he would do all that 
he was asked to do. But his men were 
already well-nigh exhausted through pro- 
longed active service without sleep ; and he 
feared that some of them would be unable 
to keep awake. His own added sense of 
responsibility enabled him to be sleepless 
even while as tired as any of his men. 

Anxious and faithful, that young officer 
moved from post to post all the night through, 
keeping watch of the watchers. As he neared 
one man on this outpost duty, he found him 
asleep. At a glance he took in the whole 
situation, and he acted in view of it. Arous- 
ing the sleeper, he brought him face to face 
with his peril. Asleep on his post, in the 
presence of the enemy ! The penalty of that 
crime was death. The officer reminded the 
soldier of this. The soldier realized it. 
"But," added the officer, in generous con- 
siderateness, "I know how tired you are, 
and I know the service which has worn you 



1 5 8 A SPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 

out. We are all tired together. But this 
line must be guarded, and we must keep 
awake to-night. Now give me your carbine, 
and lie down and get a nap. I'll take your 
place here for half an hour. Then you must 
get up, and you must keep awake; for there's 
no 'relief to us until daylight." And that 
officer insisted on carrying out this arrange- 
ment to the letter. As the tired cavalryman 
stretched himself for his needed and longed- 
for sleep, he realized as never before his 
indebtedness to one whose sleeplessness en- 
abled him to sleep; and to the day of his 
death that lesson was never forgotten by him 
who learned it then and there. There is not 
one of us who has not in some way had 
cause for similar gratitude to one whose 
sleeplessness has secured to us the privi- 
lege of needful sleep. 

There is, in fact, no promise of God's lov- 
ing fidelity to those who trust him which is 
more precious as it stands, or for which we 
have more reason to be grateful, than the 
promise of his tireless sleeplessness as the 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 59 

watcher over his dear ones, and as " he giveth 
unto his beloved in [their] sleep : " 

" He will not suffer thy foot to be moved : 
He that keepeth thee will not slumber. 
Behold, he that keepeth Israel 
Shall neither slumber nor sleep." 

Therefore it is that the Psalmist says, and 
therefore it is that every one of us can say : 

" In peace will I both lay me down and sleep : 
For thou, Lord, alone makest me dwell in safety," 

But it is not alone those who wake and 
watch of their own choice, as a matter of 
duty, to whose sleeplessness we are indebted 
for much that we have reason to be grateful 
for. Those who cannot sleep are, in many 
an instance, enabled by their very sleepless- 
ness to be a means of good to us beyond all 
that they could compass in our behalf if they 
slept as others sleep. There are sorrows and 
sufferings which forbid sleep, but which en- 
rich the soul of the sleepless one; and out 
of such sleeplessness there comes a blessing 
to all who are within the sweep of its benefit 



160 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

cent influence. Paul and Silas, with their 
smarting backs and their fettered feet in their 
inner dungeon at Philippi, could not sleep, 
but in their sleeplessness they could sing 
God's praises with such added sweetness and 
power that the strains of their rejoicing filled 
the ears of their heaviest-hearted companions 
in bondage, and transformed the gloomy- 
prison-house into a sanctuary of light and 
peace in Christian believing. And the song- 
filled sleeplessness of weary prisoners of 
grief and pain is one of the potent forces 
of good in the universe of God to-day. 

" Lo ! a band of pale 
Yet joyful priests do minister around 
The altar, where the lights are burning low 
In the breathless night. Each grave brow wears 

the crown 
Of sorrow, and each heart is kept awake 
By its own restless pain ; for these are they 
To whom the night watch is appointed. See ! 
They lift their hands, and bless God in the night! 
Whilst we are sleeping, those to whom the King 
Has measured out a cup of sorrow, sweet 
With his dear love, yet very hard to drink, 
Are waiting in his temple, and the eyes 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. l6l 

That cannot sleep for sorrow or for pain 
Are lifted up to heaven ; and sweet low songs, 
Broken by patient tears, arise to God. 
Bless ye the Lord, ye servants of the Lord, 
Which stand by night within his holy place 
To give him worship ! Ye are priests to him, 
And minister around the altar, pale 
Yet joyful in the night." 

And because of this loving, grateful service 
of God's sleepless worshipers, we w T ho sleep 
and rest are sharers in the blessing which 
their devotion brings. 

It is in the hours of sleeplessness from 
sorrow and pain that the faithful heart grows 
tenderest toward God and toward God's dear 
ones; and it is only through these experi- 
ences in sleeplessness that any God-inspired 
comforter of those who mourn or who suffer 
acquires his chiefest power of comforting. 
He who has never been so racked and 
tried that he could not sleep, cannot speak 
intelligibly to the heart of hearts of a sleep- 
less sufferer. And he whose words come 
home to every aching heart like strength- 
bringing balm, is sure to be one who has 
ii 



1 62 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

waked and watched involuntarily while others 
slept restfully. To realize this truth is in- 
evitably to give us a new sense of our indebt- 
edness to those who have acquired their 
power to help us at the cost of wearying 
sleeplessness. 

There is comfort in this truth to those who 
cannot sleep. Because there is new power 
for good through waking and watching while 
others sleep, that sleeplessness which is un- 
welcome for its own sake can be welcomed 
for Christ's sake. When we must count the 
long hours of darkness drearily, through 
pain or sorrow that will not let us sleep, 
we can thank God that by this means we 
are gaining an insight of his love, and a 
nearness to himself, that shall enable us to 
minister in his name to those whose needs 
can be met only through our wise use of 
sleeplessness. 



XVIII. 

THE MINISTRY OF SORROW. 



The pain of sorrow is readily perceived; 
but the gain of sorrow it is not so easy to 
recognize. Yet to no experience of our 
human life do we owe more for the devel- 
opment and the perfecting of our personal 
character, and for the bringing of us into 
right relations with our fellows and with our 
God, than to the experiences of sorrow. In- 
deed, it may be said that none of us are at 
our best save through God's ministry of sor- 
row to us, and in us, and through us; and 
that the measure of our tenderness, of our 
sympathy, of our practical helpfulness, and 
of our abiding and prevailing faith, corres- 
ponds with the measure of our wise improve- 
ment of our personal sorrows. 

To have sorrow is a very different thing 
from being sorry. To be sorry is simply to 

163 



1 64 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES^ 

be sore-y ; to wince under pain caused by our 
own or by another's loss or misdoing. To 
have sorrow is to have "mental suffering 
under the privation of some good we actually 
possessed, or concerning which we entertained 
a pleasing expectation; " it is to grieve over a 
lost good, or under a present evil. Sorrow 
is deeper and more permanent than sorriness. 
It does not always move one's innermost 
being to be sorry; but one cannot have real 
sorrow save as his innermost being is moved. 
If, indeed, it were not for the ministry of sor- 
row, the highest ministry of joy would be 
unknown to us. We could neither love nor 
be loved at the best without the lessons of 
this ministry; and only thereby can we know 
the full blessings of memory, of hope, and 
of faith. 

It is discipline, not indulgence, that devel- 
ops character; and discipline comes rather 
through our losses than through our retain- 
ings. Living on in ease and comfort, and in 
the possession of all that our hearts have 
known a longing for, we have no call to the 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES, 165 

exercise of high courage, ol heroic endur- 
ance, and of sublime patience. He who has 
never known sorrow, has never made that 
attainment in character, through discipline of 
character, of which his nature is capable. 

" O sacred sorrow ! he who knows not thee 
Knows not the best emotions of the heart." 

There is always more or less of a lack in a 
character which is inexperienced in sorrow. 
And every truly admirable personal charac- 
ter, every great and noble character, every 
most winsome character, is a character w r hich 
has known sorrow, and which has secured 
the gain of sorrow through the acceptance 
and improvement of sorrow in its noblest 
ministry. Our one Pattern of character and 
of attainment was "a man of sorrows and 
acquainted with grief;" and it is divinely 
declared that it was needful that he should 
be made "perfect" — should be brought to 
the highest conceivable standard of charac- 
ter — " through sufferings." God says to every 
child of his love, " I have chosen thee in the 



1 66 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

furnace of affliction." And every sorrow- 
smitten child of God will, sooner or later, 
have reason to say, " It is good for me that I 
have been afflicted.' ' 

" Man, till the fire hath purged him, doth remain 
Mixed with all dross : 
To lack the loving discipline of pain 
Were endless loss." 

Yet sorrow is never anything less than sor- 
row, and as sorrow it is always hard to bear. 
This, indeed, is one of the primal elements 
of its helpful ministry. If all our losses were 
losses which we could see the reason of, or 
which we could endure with entire calmness, 
our innermost nature would not be moved by 
our losses. If all our griefs were griefs which 
brought their own consolation with them, 
there would be no sense of hopelessness in 
the overpowering and bewildering mystery 
of our grief. But, as it is, "all chastening" 
— through real sorrow — "seemeth for the 
present to be not joyous but grievous;" even 
though "afterward it yieldeth peaceable fruit 
unto them that have been " rightly " exercised 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 1 67 

thereby." "Ah," says Madame Guyon, "if 
you knew what peace there is in an accepted 
sorrow ! "—in a sorrow accepted in its divinely 
designed ministry of good. Henry Vaughan 
says quaintly: 

" Affliction is a mother, 
Whose painful throes yield many sons, 
Each fairer than the other." 

But all this is in the "afterward," not in the 
immediate presence of a freshly experienced 
sorrow. At the first a sorrow is even more 
than a sorrow; for, as Shakespeare has it: 

" Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, 
Which shows like grief itself, but is not so ; 
For sorrow's grief, glazed with blinding tears, 
Divides one thing entire, to many objects." 

And it is only through the experience of a 
sorrow that seems unbearable, that one gains 
in his personal character through bearing up 
and bearing on, by being upborne. 

The chiefest gain in the ministry of sorrow 
is in its bringing the stricken one to a sense 
of helpless dependence on God. It is not 



1 68 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

that the loving hand of God is always in- 
stantly recognized in sorrow; for it is often 
the case that a great sorrow seems to put, for 
the time, a cloud between the believer and 
his God, and the breaking heart cries out 
piteously under the heavier load than it can 
bear. But it is that, even from under the 
cloud and from beneath the crushing bur- 
den, the cry, although piteous or despairing, 
is a God-ward cry. As Mrs. Browning tells 
us, in her "Cry of the Human:" 

" 'There is no God,' the foolish saith, 

But none, ' There is no sorrow ; ' 
And nature oft the cry of faith 

In bitter need will borrow. 
Eyes which the preacher could not school, 

By wayside graves are raised, 
And lips say, ' God be pitiful ! ' 

Who ne'er said, ' God be praised ! ' " 

And it is in this very tendency of sorrow 
that there is, so far, a gain to the soul which 
sorrows. " Man's extremity is God's oppor- 
tunity. ,, It is when man is consciously help- 
less that God can be man's sufficiency. Thus 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 69 

it is that God's strength is made perfect, is 
shown in its completeness, in and through 
man's weakness. And thus it is, as the godly 
Faber says, that: 

" Good is that darkening of our lives, 
Which only God can brighten ; 
But better still that hopeless load 
Which none but God can lighten." 

Sorrow's ministry to us begins by its shutting 
us up to help and hope in God alone. 

But there is a ministry to us in the loving 
sympathy of others in our sorrow; and it is 
for us to minister to others through our new 
attainments by sorrow. We should never 
know how many hearts are drawn to us in 
loving sympathy, if we were never in sor- 
row; nor, indeed, could we be the means of 
drawing the hearts of so many to us in ten- 
derness, if we were never sorrow-smitten. 
More share with us in our sorrows than 
could ever share with us in our enjoyments. 
And more are prompt to express this sense 
of sympathy than that. Those who would 
stand aloof from us while all went well, are 



I/O ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

moved to tell us freely, or to show us clearly, 
how their hearts bleed with and for us in our 
grief. We may even gain love through los- 
ing our loved ones. And through the lesson 
of our sorrow, and through our new sense of 
the value of loving sympathy in the hour of 
sorrow, we are fitted to be ministers of sym- 
pathy and cheer to the sorrowing. 

Says Esther Maurice Hare, in her Letters 
to her sisters in sorrow : " Sorrow is a force 
of incalculable power; able, rightly applied, 
* to move mountains.' . . . Rightly viewed, 
sorrow is a gift, as much as our wealth or 
our health; and we must as much prepare to 
be asked what we have done with the one, as 
how we have used the other. For sorrow is 
as fruitful of graces as charity itself." Hence 
a ministry of sorrow through us to others, is 
that ministry by which we " comfort them 
that are in any affliction through the com- 
fort wherewith we ourselves are comforted 
of God." 

One of the most comforting ministries of 
sorrow, when the true ministry of sorrow is 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 7 1 

recognized and accepted by the child of God, 
is the proof it brings to the sorrow-stricken 
one of the abounding love of God, and of 
the loving nearness of God. " God does not 
afflict willingly, nor [willingly] grieve the 
children of men." It is "whom the Lord 
loveth" that he causeth to sorrow; and 
when the Lord has reluctantly laid a bur- 
den of sorrow on one whom he loves, the 
Lord knows just how heavily that burden 
presses, and no human heart can have such 
loving sympathy with the one who sorrows 
as has the Lord himself. The heavier the 
sorrow, the surer the sustaining presence of 
Him who has permitted it to his loved one: 

" He gives his angels charge of those who sleep: 
But He himself watches with those who wake." 

And so it is that the ministry of sorrow is 
God's ministry of love to us, and in us, and 
through us, by his grace. By that grace 
" our light affliction, which is for the moment, 
worketh for us more and more exceedingly 
an eternal weight of glory; while we look 



172 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

not at the things which are seen, but at the 
things which are not seen : for the things 
which are seen are temporal ; but the things 
which are not seen are eternal." 

" Should Sorrow lay her hand upon thy shoulder, 

And walk with thee in silence on life's way, 
While Joy, the bright companion once, grown colder, 

Becomes more distant day by day ; 
Shrink not from the companionship of Sorrow, 

She is the messenger of God to thee ; 
And thou wilt thank him in his great to-morrow, — 

For what thou know'st not now, thou then shalt 
see ; — 
She is God's angel, clad in weeds of night, 

With whom ' we walk by faith, and not by sight.' " 



XIX. 

WHAT OUR DEAD DO FOR US. 



Much of the best work of the world is 
done through the present personal influence 
of the dead. And in our estimate of the 
forces which give us efficiency, we ought to 
assign a large place to the power over us, 
and in us, of loved ones whom we mourn as 
wholly removed from us. Yet this is a view 
of the truth which we are prone to lose 
sight of. 

When death takes away one on whom we 
have leaned, or to whom we have looked up, 
or with whom we have toiled and endured 
and joyed, or for whom we have had care 
and responsibility, — we recognize the mys- 
tery, and we feel the sorrow, of the event; 
while, at the same time, we are ready to 
believe that it is better for that dear one, in 
his new sphere of existence, than it could 

i73 



174 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

have been for him here. We know that 
there has been no mistake on the part of 
Him with whom are the issues of life and of 
death; and that the career of usefulness for 
which the departed child of God had been 
preparing so faithfully, or on the outer verge 
of which he still stood, has not been utterly 
closed against him, in his dying; but that 
somehow and somewhere he is continuing 
to serve and to glorify God in tireless activ- 
ity. For him, we have no fear. But the 
temptation to us is, to feel that his work for 
us is done, and that henceforth, while we live 
on here, we must live on without his presence 
or aid. Yet, as a practical fact and as a great 
spiritual truth, our dead do for us as con- 
stantly and as variously as they could do 
for us if they were still here in the flesh ; and 
they do for us very much that they could 
not do unless they were dead. 

Some of the saintly faces of fathers and 
mothers, which are a benediction to all who 
look at them, could never have shone as 
now with the reflected light of heaven, unless 






ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 175 

they had been summoned to frequent upward 
lookings through the clouds, in loving com- 
munion with their children in heaven. There 
are manly and womanly children, who are 
more serious and earnest and devoted in 
their young life-struggles, because of their 
constant sense of the over-watching presence 
of their dead parents. Many a mature life 
has more of symmetry, and more of strength 
and beauty, as a result of the chastened and 
hallowed memories of an early great sorrow 
through bereavement, which seemed as if it 
would utterly crush the young heart, but 
which really gave to that heart an unfailing 
tenderness of sympathy, and a limitless ca- 
pacity for clinging devotedness, which would 
have been an impossibility with less of a trial 
through death. And so the dead live on 
here, for, and with, and in, those who mourn 
and remember them as gone hence forever ; 
and, living on, they live to bless. 

Our living friends do much for us, but 
perhaps our dead friends do yet more. We 
do what we can for our friends while we live; 



176^ SPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 

but possibly, if we were to die, we could be 
more of a help and more of an inspiration 
to those who are dearer than life to us. 
Cardinal Newman voices this thought ten- 
derly, when he says of the grief and the 
gain of David in the death of his peerless 
friend Jonathan: 

"Yet it was well: — for so, 'mid cares of rule 

And crime's encircling tide, 
A spell was o'er thee, zealous one, to cool 

Earth-joy and kingly pride; 
With battle-scene and pageant, prompt to blend 

The pale calm specter of a blameless friend. 

"Ah ! had he lived, before thy throne to stand, 
Thy spirit keen and high 
Sure it had snapped in twain love's slender band, 

So dear in memory ; 
Paul, of his comrade reft, the warning gives, — 
He lives to us who dies ; he is but lost who lives." 

When the aged Simeon welcomed the 
child Jesus in the temple courts at Jerusalem, 
his words of prophecy concerning the won- 
drous possibilities in the infant Messiah in- 
cluded a distinct reference to the good that 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 177 

should be done to the world through the 
suffering and the sorrow which the death of 
that Son should cause to his agony-stricken 
mother. "Yea, and a sword shall pierce 
through thine own soul," he said to her; 
"that thoughts out of many hearts shall be 
revealed." And how much to this world 
has been the soul-moving power of the 
Virgin Mother's sorrow over the death of 
her Son! 

There is light and cheer in the loving 
face of the pictured Madonna with her infant 
Child; but there is no such touching of the 
innermost heart, and revealing of the more 
secret and more sacred thoughts of the mind, 
in that blessed face, as there is in the up- 
turned look of the bleeding-hearted Mater 
Dolorosa. And of all the representations 
of the Mother and Child, by the great artists 
of the ages, no other approaches — in its 
power of heart -touching and of thought- 
revealing — that wonderful face in the Sistine 
Madonna, where the far-away look of the 
tear-starting eyes gives a fore-gleam of the 

12 



178 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

sword-piercing sorrow of the mother of the 
Crucified One. 

And when Jesus himself was about to die, 
he distinctly assured his loved disciples that 
he could do more for them after his death 
than he could do by continuing to live with 
them here in the flesh. " Because I have 
spoken this thing unto you, sorrow has filled 
your heart," he said. " Nevertheless, I tell 
you the truth ; it is expedient for you that I 
go away : for if I go not away, the Comforter 
will not come unto you; but if I go, I will 
send him unto you." There is a sense in 
which this truth applies to every follower of 
Jesus, as it applied to Jesus. There is a pe- 
culiar influence of redeemed souls over their 
dear ones still on earth, which cannot be 
exercised except as a result of death. 

"They never quite leave us, our friends who have 
passed 
Through the shadows of death to the sunlight 
above ; 
A thousand sweet memories are holding them fast 
To the places they blest with their presence and 
love. 



ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 1 79 

"The work which they left, and the books which 
they read, 
Speak mutely, though still with an eloquence 
rare ; 
And the songs that they sung, the dear words that 
they said, 
Yet linger and sigh on the desolate air. 

"And oft when alone, and as oft in the throng, 
Or when evil allures us, or sin draweth nigh, 
A whisper comes gently, ' Nay, do not the wrong ; ' 
And we feel that our weakness is pitied on high." 

It is not that we should be unwilling to 
live on, doing our best for our dear ones 
here, because of the possibility of our doing 
yet more for them through our dying. Nor 
yet is it, that we should part from our dear 
ones without a pang of sorrow, when they 
are called away by death, because their 
dying will bring them added joy and larger 
influence, and may give them more power 
for good over our own lives, as we continue 
our earthly course without their visible com- 
panionship. But it is that, in our thought 
of being taken away from those whom we 
love, we need not feel that we shall thereby 



180 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

be lost to all possibility of loving ministry 
to their comfort and welfare; and that, in 
the bitterness of our keenest grief over the 
death of our loved ones, there may be the 
consoling thought that we do not lose the 
stimulus and the inspiration of their memo- 
ries, nor part, even for the time being, with 
the more sacred influence of their example, 
and of their spiritual fellowship. 

To them and to us alike, "whether we 
live, we live unto the Lord, or whether we 
die, we die unto the Lord : whether we live, 
therefore, or die, we are the Lord's. For to 
this end Christ died, and lived again, that he 
might be Lord of both the dead and the 
living." And they who are in Christ, will 
not fail of a part in the work of Christ for 
those who are dear to themselves and to 
their Saviour. 



XX. 

THE AFTERMATH OF INFLUENCE, 



Who, that has lived in the country, does 
not know the mellow and refreshing beauty 
of the autumn "aftermath," on some hillside 
field, or in some sweeping meadow which had 
seemed given over to winter's death, but is 
marvelously restored to spring-tide's life? 
That field had been plowed and sown and 
harrowed. The seed had sprung up and 
brought forth fully after its kind. Then the 
mower had come, the scythe had been swung, 
and the grain or the grass had been gathered 
into the barns. The mowed field lay deso- 
late and bare under the summer's sun and 
the latter rains. But up from the hidden life- 
giving roots of the garnered crop there sprang 
fresh blades of promise and beauty, and again 
the wide-spreading field rejoiced in its cover- 
ing of verdure. Another harvest was made 

181 



1 8 2 A SPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 

ready for; and there were life and bloom 
where had seemed only decay and death. 
There is an added beauty and an added pre- 
ciousness in the "aftermath" of the husband- 
man's grass crop from the very fact of its 
unexpectedness, and its token of abounding 
fulness in the field. The first harvest had 
been looked for in the ordinary course of 
nature; the second could not but be reckoned 
of grace. 

In the field of mind and character, as in 
the grass-field, there is an aftermath of influ- 
ence which is not always taken into account 
in our plannings for the harvest, but which 
has an impressiveness and a value which are 
all its own. As in the natural world, so in 
the world of influence, the aftermath has a 
peculiar beauty under the light of its autum- 
nal skies; and in this field, as not in the other, 
it is commonly the larger and more impor- 
tant garnering of the two. The aftermath of 
influence is likely to be the real measure of 
influence in any sphere; and until the after- 
math is gathered from the field, none can say 



A SPIRA TIONS A ND I NFL UENCES. 1 8 3 

with any positiveness what shall be the har- 
vest there. 

The first garnering of a mother's, or a 
teacher's, or a pastor's, influence, in the field 
of a child's mind, sometimes seems to give 
no return for the labor it has cost; and, after 
it all, the field looks bare and hopeless enough. 
The harvest is past and the summer is ended, 
and that child is not saved; but then for the 
aftermath. John Newton's mother died when 
he was scarcely seven years old. She had 
faithfully sowed the seed of truth in his 
mind; but he grew up godless and vicious. 
A profane infidel sailor, the servant of a slave- 
dealer, and again a public felon, bound in irons 
and flogged at the whipping-post, his man- 
hood's harvest was a poor garnering for his 
mother's sowing. But underneath the sur- 
face of his heart's soil lay buried the memory 
of that mother's hand upon his head in prayer 
as he kneeled with her, in his boyhood. The 
loving pressure of that hand was never wholly 
lost to him. It was felt by him, at times, in 
all his darkest days of sinning ; and, by God's 



1 84 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

grace, it gently drew him back to the place 
of faith-filled prayer. From that root of im- 
pressions there came the starting of new life 
in all the field of his mind and heart; and the 
aftermath of his mother's influence has filled 
the world with song and story. And so, to 
a lesser or a larger degree, with many another 
wayward boy. 

In a city mission-school in Hartford, Con- 
necticut, nearly forty years ago, a kind-hearted 
teacher toiled faithfully and endured patiently 
with one boy in his class who seemed thor- 
oughly and hopelessly bad. He visited that 
boy in his wretched home, he invited him to 
his own pleasant room, he clothed him, found 
one place after another of employment for 
him, spoke to him always in kindness, coun- 
seling and warning him untiringly; but all to 
no seeming purpose. The boy was still wild, 
coarse, profane, reckless, ungrateful. At last 
he ran away from his home, and shipped on 
a Liverpool vessel from New York. The end 
had come to his life in that mission-school ; 
but what a harvest for all that sowing ! 



ASPIRA TIONS AND INFL UENCES. 1 8 5 

Three years went by. Then from far up in 
British India word came from that boy, say- 
ing that he was a soldier in the English Army 
under Sir Colin Campbell, battling against the 
Sepoys. Already he had marched eight hun- 
dred miles, and endured untold privations 
and hardships. But there, in that far land, 
shut in among the mountains, away from 
home and Christian surroundings, sick in 
body and sad in spirit, he had recalled the 
lessons of his Hartford mission-school; and 
now the aftermath of his discouraged teach- 
er's influence showed itself in his words of 
penitence and gratitude, and of trust in his 
Redeemer's love. 

The hope of the aftermath of influence may 
well stay the fainting heart of parent and 
teacher and preacher, when the first harvest 
in a well-sown and well-tilled field is a dis- 
appointment and a mockery. While there is 
life below the surface, there is hope for a new 
garnering above it. It is natural and proper 
to expect the greatest good in the immediate 
results of influence; but we afe encouraged 



1 86 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

also to believe that the secondary, or the ulti- 
mate, results of good influence may be larger 
and better than the primary results. If not 
now, then by and by. If not in the first gar- 
nering, then in the aftermath. 

" Age is opportunity no less 
Than youth itself, though in another dress ; 
And as the evening twilight fades away, 
The sky is filled with stars invisible by day." 

There is a warning, as well as an encour- 
agement, in this thought of the aftermath of 
influence; for it is a truth as applicable to 
evil seed as to good. This is peculiarly ap- 
parent in the case of many a man of lovely 
spirit and of admirable personal qualities who 
embraces error and teaches it. His imme- 
diate influence is largely on the side of right, 
and the first harvest of his life teachings gives 
much to rejoice over. But, after he has passed 
away, up from the roots of error which he 
planted, there springs a noxious growth which 
results in a sad harvest of evil to the world. 
His followers evidence the pernicious nature 
of his beliefs, without the redeeming qualities 



A SPIRA TIONS AND 1NFL UENCES. 1 87 

which gave them attractiveness as he held 
them. Our peculiar personal faults of speech, 
or manner, or conduct, seem only flaws — or 
hardly that — to those who know us at our 
best; but the aftermath of our influence, 
through what we say, or what we do, or what 
we are, in the wrong direction, may be such 
as would make the angels weep. 

Seed-sowing in the field of influence is 
always for more than one harvest. There is 
the sure aftermath, as well as the first garner- 
ing. Whether of good or evil, there is life 
• in the root even after all that was above the 
surface has been cut away. What you do, 
and, more than all, what you are, to-day, is 
to have power over others, or in others, not 
only to-day, but in the long-distant future. 
"The teacher," says Confucius, "is a pattern 
for ten thousand ages;" and every person is, 
in one sense or another, a teacher. The chief 
harvest of our influence may be to-day; and 
again it may be ten thousand ages hence — 
whatever may seem our failure or our suc- 
cess to-day. 



1 88 ASPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES. 

" Read we not the mighty thought 
Once by ancient sages taught ? 

Though it withered in the blight 

Of the mediaeval night, 
Now the harvest we behold ; 
See ! it bears a thousand-fold. 

" If God's wisdom has decreed 
One may labor, yet the seed 
Barely in this life shall grow, 
Shall the sower cease to sow ? 
The fairest truth may yet be born 
On the resurrection morn." 



